The Ahli team is enormously successful on the field and off. I've been told that they have defeated Zamalek in the championships for close to 100 years running. Not sure of the veracity of that, but it's clear they are the better team. Their midfielder and domestic Zinedine Zidane, Abo Treika, is THE sports celebrity of Egypt and perhaps one of the better players in Africa. He is the face of Vodaphone, the sponsor of Al-Ahli, and appears to be perhaps the nicest guy on the planet, or has a fantastic publicity agent. When he's not playing football he is visiting little kids in hospitals and spearheading UNICEF anti-hunger initiatives. You can't escape Abo Treika.
The championship games between Ahli and Zamalek are a study in chaos theory, when 120,000 people cram into a stadium designed for 72,000. We went to a regular league game when the stadium was not full, and it was out of control. We went to Soren's house prior to the game to have a beer or two since there is no alcohol sold at the stadium (probably a good thing) and left as a group dressed in red. I think we made a lot of people's day walking to the Metro dressed in Ahli colours.
Getting to the stadium we had to have Soren's face painted, flags had to be purchased, and kitsch needed admiring.
Once we were suitably attired we made it through a crowd of riot police sufficient enough to fight a small war (which is sort of how I imagine football riots) only to get into the stadium to find 60,000 screaming fans and another thousand or so riot police, just for good measure. Soren captured it better than I did, so I'll defer to his photos of the rows upon rows or riot police.
The crowd was simply unreal. Absolutely indescribable. The stadium was split in half, with Ahli on one side and Zamalek on the other. A sea of white on the Zamelek side and a sea of red on the Ahli side. I gotta give Ahli credit for being more organized in their cheers, but Zamalek was definitely much more creative. Their signs were self-deprecating and witty, whereas Ahli seemed to be much more into the groupthink chanting. I think my favorite was the Zamalek banner that read in both Arabic and English "Watch... Learn... Try Again Later" in reference to their perpetual losses.
I have to confess that I wore the colours of Ahli that night, but at heart I may be a Zamalek fan.
After years of watching the Yankees mercilessly crush my Twins in the first round of the playoffs, I am not sure how I can honestly support the Egyptian equivalent of the Yankees. It's unconscionable. But then again, just a simple desire to not get beaten up by Ahli fans might keep me an Ahli fan.
The game itself was not as compelling as the buildup, in a lot of ways. Soccer is a fun spectator sport, but it is difficult to follow the intricacy of it from afar. It doesn't help that I took one for the team and was purchasing water at the time of the scoring of the only goal of the game. I hear it was not that interesting, but a little frustrating nonetheless. I miss the only goal of my first professional soccer game. Sigh. And of course the goal was scored by Abo Treika. Figures. I'd go again, if nothing else for the spectacle. It's a little difficult to get into the teams though when you don't have the kind of cultural accretion that truly makes it exciting. Maybe if I lived here for a little bit longer, but if I ever find myself truly rooting for one team or another, then I know I've been here too long.
I apologize for the paucity of multimedia for this blog post. Truly the only way to convey this might be by picture and video, but the internet in this country takes pathetic to a new level so I simply can't upload most of the video and pictures that I do have.
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