FORMER Zimbabwe international goalkeeper and Liverpool legend Bruce Grobbelaar has opened up on his experiences during the chaos and violence which marred the Warriors’ famous 1994 World Cup qualifier against Egypt in Cairo.
BY DANIEL NHAKANISO
The Warriors’ highly contentious 1994 World Cup qualifier against Egypt in 1993 was marred by crowd trouble from the host fans, which saw Grobbelaar and the late German coach Reinhard Fabisch being hit and injured by missiles.
Zimbabwe lost the match 2-1 and successfully appealed against the result before the replay was staged at the Stade de Gerland in Lyon, France, which ended goalless.
Ultimately the Warriors’ Dream Team agonisingly missed out on the ticket to the 1994 World Cup hosted by USA to Cameroon after losing 3-1 in Yaoundé needing only a point to qualify.
And last week, Grobbelaar reminisced on that controversial encounter in Cairo during a wide-ranging interview with the popular Egyptian and African football website KingFut.
Speaking about the match, Grobbelaar said: “It didn’t start just with us being struck by objects. There’s a thing about being fair and then there’s a thing about being not nice and fair. They were not nice, but they weren’t fair. We go to Egypt and they put us in a hotel on the edge of the desert with no air conditioning. They did not put us downtown where the hotels are good. ”
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“It’s a difficult situation, you get into the Olympic Stadium and you have 120 000 people in the stadium and you go one up, what do you think they’re going to do? They start breaking the stadium to throw rocks at you. The rocks are coming, there’s a track around, but the rocks are still coming. I get smacked because the ball boys are too scared to go across the track right near the people to get the ball, so I’m running to get the ball.”
“I get bonked on the head. There’s a bit of blood, I wipe the blood away so there’s blood on my glove and they picked it on camera. Our coach comes out of the dugout, he gets struck, gets a big cut and is on the ground. We go back to the hotel and we’re getting chased by everybody else and we couldn’t even come out of the hotel to have a drink. So we made a submission that it was unfair and Fifa [agreed].”
Grobbelaar also spoke about a short-lived trip to Egypt on vacation with his family after the incident-filled qualifier in Cairo.
“I go on holiday to Egypt to see the pyramids and the sphinx with my family. Coming into Egypt, I give them my passport they say no, no, no, you’re not coming in .. get out. They didn’t want me there.”
Asked about the best African players that he faced in his career, Grobbelaar did not hesitate to name former Pharaohs’ strikers Hossam Hassan.
“Hossam Hassan from Egypt, [he was] unbelievable,” Grobbelaar said.
“We had a torrid time against him.”
Hossam Hassan was listed among some of the other elite strikers of Africa during the times together with the likes of Zambia’s Kalusha Bwalya, the Cameroonian duo of Roger Milla and Samuel Eto’o, and South Africa’s Doctor Khumalo.
