[ALBSA-Info] Football

[Agron Alibali]

Financial Times (London) 


March 24, 2001, Saturday London Edition 1 

Albania eager for action 

By SIMON KUPER 


Albanian football has never had such a big week.
Albania play Germany today and host England on
Wednesday, which adds up to one more match than they
played in a seven-year stretch in the 1970s after
Enver Hoxha, the then dictator, had broken with the
rest of the world. 

International matches were never common in communist
days. Mehdi Zhega, now Albania's manager, remembers
playing for the team that held West Germany to a 0-0
draw in 1967. Four years later, the German manager,
Helmut Schon, came to watch them against Turkey. "Have
you been playing much recently?" Schon asked the
Albanians afterwards, to which the reply was: "This is
our first match since we drew against you." 

When the Communist regime fell 10 years ago this week,
Albania emerged from isolation and the football team
got better. Last year Albania won five of their eight
matches, their best record since the early 1980s. Best
of all was October's 2-0 home win against Greece, a
country that treats its hundreds of thousands of
Albanian immigrants with less than total respect. 

That match, says Gramoz Pashko, a leading figure in
the Albanian revolution of 1991, now economic adviser
to the prime minister, "was fantastic. Even a liberal
like me all of a sudden became an Albanian patriot". 

Playing Germany and England will not mean quite as
much. Virtually every Albanian expects their team to
lose both games. Indeed, some of them will be
supporting the opposition: German and English football
yield in popularity in Albania only to the Italian
game, which means that they are very popular indeed. 

On England's previous visit to Tirana, in 1989 when
they won 2-0, their training sessions were guarded by
the Sigurimi, the Communist secret police. 

This time Beckham and Co might relish similar
protection from their teenage Albanian fans. Even an
Albanian player might be tempted to try for Beckham's
autograph. 

But awe of the west has lessened since Zhega's playing
days. The coach says that when he pulled on an Albania
shirt, "we didn't believe in a victory, because
(Franz) Beckenbauer or (Kevin) Keegan or Bobby
Charlton were so great". 

Now most of the best Albanians play for foreign clubs
(or at least sit on their substitutes' benches) and no
longer regard western footballers as beings from
another universe. 

Boosting Albanian confidence further is the curious
fact that they stand above England in the group table.
Albania have three points from their two World Cup
qualifying matches, and England only one, a
discrepancy that has been noted many times by each of
the half-dozen Albanian sports newspapers. 

Simon Kuper 


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