The Palestinian Team and the Palestinians
It was a great accomplishment that the Palestinian football team reached for its first time the Asian cup. A great accomplishment in a nation that lacks everything among them real competitive results in anything within the world range.
It brought a sense of pride, with all what football brings. After all, it felt great to cheer for your own team while watching the cup not others.
But as usual we believed that the team can hold with it championships, even though we know well they are not prepared. Removing all the basics of what it means to be a Palestinian team, starting with bad circumstances in fields and serious environment that breeds players, to the fact that the players get killed by the Israelis, prisoned, and they never really know if they can leave to play outside except their feel step into any country outside. These are the basics of what surrounds the Palestinian team with not a single word of exaggeration. Which initially results in forming a team that is a result of clustering from here and they’re also in the last moment, because you never know if you can bring a player from one area to another. Then comes the real expertise in training and in capacity that we fully know that the Palestinian team neither gets nor is capable of giving. But yet, the team worked its way out.
Losing its second game in the cup shouldn’t also be a surprise. Losing to Jordan made it feel like an embarrassment, forgetting again, that regardless to the fact that Jordan is closest to us by blood and by distance, the Jordanian team is a real team when it comes to what comprises a team and its surrounding circumstances.
What surprises me is the anger from us, the audience. What did we really expect? As usual we create heroes out of normal people, who are simply working their way out, and they shouldn’t become heroes, because the way in making history in a game requires so much, that we still lack. What the Palestinian team managed to achieve by far is important and worth encouragement. It shouldn’t make him a team of heroes, and it shouldn’t make him a team that brought defeats.