It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Al Shabab this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad29 Mar 2027
Fahad Khalfan falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Al Shabab this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
There is a particular warmth a ground reserves for a 22-year-old it feels ownership of. Youssef Hassan has it now, and everything he does for the rest of his time here will be measured against the goodwill he was handed for free.
Marked 8.37 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
Player ratings1 Feb 2027
Youssef Hassan was on a different afternoon to everybody else
8.13. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
The words a physio says slowly. 100 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 6 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
2‑3 to Al Jazira, and no complaints worth printing. The performance asked for nothing more than it got.
Squad26 Oct 2026
Walid Hassan falls out with a teammate over standards
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Al Shabab know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
138 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Al Shabab lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Youssef Al Bloushi was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
8.00. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.
There is no complaint available here and everybody involved knows it, which does not make the walk to the bench any shorter. Form is the only currency in football that cannot be borrowed against.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Walid Al Junaibi signs something — a contract at Al Shabab or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
Nobody at Al Shabab is suggesting he is out of form. The manager simply wanted somebody with a different set of qualities for ninety specific minutes, and there is nothing a player can train to fix that.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Al Shabab this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.