Africa Cup of Nations: Libya team a symbol of hope for nation renewed | Jonathan Wils

[Jonathan Wilson]

Libya get the Cup of Nations underway on Saturday without their best player but with a team united by adversity
Ask around and the consensus is that Libya's best player is the midfielder Tariq al-Taib. He has twice finished in the top 10 of the voting for African Player of the Year, had successful stints in Tunisia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and captained the national side the last time they reached the finals of the Cup of Nations, in 2006. When Libya walk out at the Estadio de Bata on Saturday to face Equatorial Guinea in the opening game of the 28th Cup of Nations, though, Taib will not be there.
He is 34 and last year signed for the Kuwaiti side Al Naser, but Taib is not part of the Cup of Nations squad. "Too old," says Libya's Brazilian coach Marcos Paquetá. It's a convenient excuse. Last March, after Libya had gone top of their qualifying group with a 3-0 victory over the Comoros in a game played in Mali because of the conflict at home, Taib came out as a Gaddafi loyalist, describing the rebels as "rats" and "dogs". Three months later, the squad began to turn.
Walid al-Kahatroushi, who had scored the opening goal in that first game against the Comoros, heard that a friend of his had lost an arm in the fighting shortly before the return fixture. He decided he could no longer pull on a shirt bearing the flag of Gaddafi's Libya, walked out on the squad – the first anybody knew of his decision being when they saw him waving from beyond the gates of their camp – and, after visiting his friend in hospital in Tripoli, joined the rebels at Jebel Nafusa near the Tunisian border.
At first they would not let him fight, but as the situation became more desperate, he was forced to the front line. He was lucky; he survived long enough to see Gaddafi toppled, after which the rebels told him he could serve his country best by playing for the national team and qualifying them for the Cup of Nations for only the third time.
Although his son, Saadi, loved football, running the federation and the Tripoli club Al-Ahly, and having a brief and deeply inglorious spell as a player at Perugia where he was voted the worst ever Serie A signing, Gaddafi himself hated the game. He shut down the local league in 1979, supposedly because, seeing the names of players written on walls, he became jealous of their popularity and afraid of the potential of revolt from the terraces.

In 2000, he was given a clear insight into the anarchic passions football can provoke. There had long been complaints that the league was rigged to ensure Saadi's Al

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