After enduring many setbacks in his life, Iraq’s 30-year-old striker Aymen Hussein has written a new chapter in World Cup history. Although Iraq lost 1-4 to a powerful Norway in their opening match at 4 a.m. Wednesday, the side’s only goal came from him. Even in defeat, he left his mark on football’s biggest stage. Iraq’s head coach Graham Arnold said: “He is the kind of player who is very hard to control inside the box. I am very happy and proud for him.”
Hussein grew up in an Iraq where football became a path to unity amid volatile and crisis-ridden conditions. Iraqi players were semi-professionals — because of the country’s internal security crisis they had to travel to Jordan to play in tournaments. That crisis claimed thousands of lives each year. While celebrating a semifinal win over South Korea, a suicide bombing killed several dozen people.
From 2006 to 2008 the country was gripped by civil-war-like political instability driven by Shia-Sunni conflict. It was during this difficult period that the young Hussein suffered a tragic personal loss. In 2008, when he was just 12, his father — an Iraqi soldier — was killed by al-Qaeda gunfire while out buying building materials. A few years later, Hussein’s elder brother was abducted; his family has still not found him.
In an interview, Hussein said: “I had decided to give up football to look after my family. But my mother would not agree.” With his mother’s encouragement, the goal-machine Hussein eventually carried Iraq to the World Cup for the first time since the 1986 Mexico World Cup. The striker, who broke into the national team in 2015, has scored 34 international goals for his country to date.
His World Cup preparation did not go smoothly either. After arriving in the United States early this month, he was detained and questioned for around seven hours at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. He seemed to answer that ordeal on the pitch — beating goalkeeper Orjan Nyland with a fine header against Norway.
Hussein is a master at turning a ball in the air into a goal. He was the team’s best performer in Iraq’s historic World Cup qualifying campaign. On the way to reaching the tournament through the inter-confederation play-off, he scored 12 goals — more than double that of any teammate. He came alive at the most important moment: his was the winning goal in the 2-1 victory over Bolivia in March in Guadalupe, which secured Iraq’s place at the World Cup.
If this goal-machine can hold his current form, Iraq may still keep alive their dream of advancing from Group I to the next round — even though the group also contains France and Senegal.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report