About the Almountakhab Moroccan newspaper-Written by: Badr Al-Din Al-Idrisi
We should not reduce the scope of the dream of an exceptional Olympics for Moroccan football, equal to or exceeding what was achieved 52 years ago in the Munich Games, and the Lions passing the first round in their second participation in the Olympic Games, just because this Olympic team arrives in Paris missing its most important human pillars, due to the ban imposed by some European clubs on the Moroccan Lions, based on an unfair decision by FIFA not to include the Olympic competition in its annual calendar. There is no doubt that those who are absent from these are important elements, and it is also true that the line most affected by this announced ban is the defense line, which is missing Shadi Riyad, who joined Crystal Palace from Betis, and the left-back of Nice, Ayoub El Amraoui. However, standing for long at the wall of complaint will not benefit us at all, as it is better for us to be optimistic about those who were officially approved as ambassadors for Moroccan football, and to give them our full support. Football has shown us in many of its tournaments, players and teams that entered the competition in obscurity due to the sudden absences that befell them, and came out of it having surprised everyone with results that turned expectations upside down. So far, if we look at the balance of nominations, we will find that the Olympic team supported by Al-Muhammadi, Hakimi and Rahimi, is classified in its group as the second best team after Argentina, and that most nominations place it in the category of those who qualified for the quarter-finals with the Tango team. The draw decided to put our Olympic team from the beginning, facing the Argentine team coming to this Olympics with unparalleled enthusiasm to add a new pearl to the unique necklace of Argentine football, which has won two titles in less than two years, one world and the other continental, and the greatest ambition is to complete the historic trilogy by winning the Olympic gold, and whatever the desire, motivation and ambition of this team to write a new history, the Moroccan team will try to formulate the best start to its Olympic journey, and the best start, of course, is to avoid defeat because it frustrates morale and fuels the hell of doubt. So how can our Olympic team tame the Argentine tango? Of course, this taming requires firstly composure, secondly collective intelligence in intuiting situations and thirdly enjoying great boldness when creating offensive phrases and fourthly being very careful not to disturb the balance in defensive and offensive tasks, as long as those who stand in front of the Olympic team are players accustomed to ferocity and to mastering the role of the stalker who snatches goals from sometimes impossible situations. With this ambition with which our Olympians will play this Wednesday in Saint-Etienne, the historic achievement, if they do not lose the opening match, will be that Morocco will avoid losing for the first time when facing a Latin team in the Olympics, given that it lost consecutively to Brazil, Paraguay and Chile in the Olympic Games, Los Angeles 1984, Barcelona 1992 and Sydney 2000.
We hope that the Geoffroy-Guichard Stadium in Saint-Etienne this Wednesday, the stadium that witnessed the most wonderful green epic of the Saint-Etienne team in 1976, will witness the writing of the first chapter of the Moroccan Iliad in the Paris Olympics.
