SUDAN is engaged in a murderous civil war and yet football carries on, bringing a touch of humanity amid terrible suffering.
Football is a long way from perfection but time and plenty of wars have shown that it motivates people and brings moments of grace among the desolation.
Most people know of the Christmas Day 1914 kickabout in a brief truce between German troops and British squaddies.
On a later occasion, our soldiers were provided with footballs to kick as they charged enemy lines.
Women played their part in that war and many munitions factories formed football teams.
Shortly afterwards, the FA stopped this with a ban that prevented official women’s football for 50 years, claiming it was undignified.
Maybe, but the huge crowds they were drawing, 50,000 for one in Preston, caused official annoyance.
Football is only “war” in the over-heated imagination of terrace drunks, psychopaths and plain idiots and only once, thank goodness, has it been a major cause.
It happened after a 1969 World Cup qualifier between El Salvador and Honduras whose governments were already a long way from comradeship as neighbours in central America.
The war lasted only four days but more than 2,000 people were killed and three El Salvador planes shot down.
War as a backdrop is fairly common. In Sudan, it is life and death.
About 150,000 people have been slaughtered and 14million displaced from homes. Football grounds around the capital, Khartoum, have become graveyards.
So far Sudan have played home matches in five neighbouring African countries.
Their head coach James Kwesi Appiah says: “Most of the time when we are in camp, a message will come that one of the players has lost a family member. It’s happened about five times.
“Why can’t we all do something to let these guys achieve, so that at least the people back home will be happy?”
Appiah, former Ghana captain and coach, has led Sudan to a place in the Africa Cup of Nations finals in Morocco in a year’s time and within hailing distance of the 2026 World Cup.
It is an amazing achievement. And in the hell of Sudan, it is a mental haven of hope.
When war gives way to fanaticism, results can be striking.
In Afghanistan, the male-run Taliban outlawed women’s sport and the world in general has nodded acceptance.
There have been no sanctions and so the country’s men — useless at football, useful at cricket — carry on, undisturbed by controversy or embarrassment.
Neither war nor pestilence can keep a good team down.
Why should they? Only men matter there.
A few women have overcome this apartheid.
The Afghan cricket team fled to Australia, whose cricket authority offered a sole protest on their behalf by refusing to play a men’s match against the rogue country.
The International Cricket Council have remained silent and, far from any boycott, Afghan’s men’s team are flourishing.
So is the Ukrainian Premier League, which defied the Russian invasion, and has just signed a new TV contract. The 16-team competition has only ever been halted by Covid.
Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv dominate the top places since the league was formed after the country’s split from Russia.
Indeed, after the invasion Shakhtar left Donetsk for Kyiv where, along with Dynamo and Metalist 1925, they share the 70,500 capacity Olympic stadium.
Proving neither war nor pestilence can keep a good team down.
