Iraq's inevitable path to Spain's Jesús Casas
After seven months in search for a new coach, the Iraqi FA finally found their man in 49-year-old Spaniard Jesús Casas, the former right-hand man of La Roja's national coach Luis Enrique. However, Iraq was always going to look to Spain for expertise to improve football, in a country once heavily influenced by British and Italian football in the last century, with Spanish Fútbol having slowly permeated the football psyche in the Land of the Two Rivers.
El satélite
After the 2003 War, I recall watching players at a top Iraqi club chatting and discussing a Spanish La Liga game while jogging on a training pitch.
On a cold winter’s day, the players would turn up for afternoon training after a hard day’s work. They had come from all over the country. "The road from Latifiya is open and fully secure," one player told his teammates, describing his frightening journey from Baghdad through the infamous town of Latifiya where travellers had been beheaded or kidnapped only days before.
The players laced up their boots, jogged around the pitch and did stretches to warm up while chatting about a Spanish game shown on satellite the night before. Satellite dishes were banned under Saddam’s rule, caught in the possession of one would have led to a heavy fine and a six-month prison sentence. This was the start of the Españya footballing revolution in Iraq.
The Spanish influence in Iraq grew stronger in the post-war years, especially with the advent of satellite television and Spain winning the Euros in 2008 and the World Cup two years later followed by a second Euros in 2012.
But the football rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona was what truly captured the imagination of the country. In Iraq, you are either a Madridi or Barceloni where matches have even led to conflicts between different tribes while you can find Barca bumper stickers, Real Madrid and Barca chips or crisps and one Madridi supporter even named his daughter Madrid in honour of the Royal club.
Jesús Casas
For months the Iraqi FA was looking over the CVs of prospective foreign coaches and then seemed to have hit a brick wall over the lack of finances and coaches unwilling to live and work in Iraq, with officials mulling over assigning a local coach instead. But then, the FA president met with the Spanish FA president Luis Manuel Rubiales in Madrid, and finally managed to find a breakthrough. Adnan Dirjal had asked the ex-Xerez CD and Levante UD player for his opinion on Spanish coaches who could potentially supervise the Iraqi team and came back with two names, one of which was Jesus Casas.
Yugoslav Ljubomir Kokeza was the first foreign coach to supervise the Iraqi national team in 1968, he had previously coached in Egypt and even spoke a little Arabic. At the time, the Iraqi FA was following the trend in the Middle Easten region of appointing a coach from Eastern Europe to acquire coaching expertise.
The appointment of Jesús Casas is a departure from previous coaches who have managed the Iraqi team. Not since 1951, when 36-year-old PE teacher and lecturer Dhia Habib took charge of the first Iraqi team, has the Iraqi FA handed the reins of the national team to a trainer with relatively little experience.
Casas is not only untested as a head coach but also at a senior level, having only worked as a coach in youth football, analyst and assistant coach, and constitutes as a gamble for Adnan Dirjal and the Iraqi FA, but it is also what Iraqi football needs at this present time.
He is a modern-day coach, one on the cusp of the latest innovations in the present game. The Madrid-born and adopted gaditano analyst-turned-coach found his way to top-level football after impressing Luis Enrique, then coach of Barcelona's B team, with a report on one of his opponents when Casas was working as an analyst for Eibar, eventually going on to work under him at the Nou Camp and with Spain.
Qatari football and how fellow Spaniard Félix Sánchez achieved success with Al-Annabi, beginning at the Aspire Academy and culminating with Qatar winning its first Asian Cup nine years later in 2015 is also partly why the Iraqi FA opted for Casas.
Iraq's FA president Adnan Dirjal was one of the first Iraqis to coach in Qatar in the early 1990s, where he had moderate success and witnessed for himself how Qatari football had reinvented itself and now wants to try and replicate it in Iraq with the appointment of Casas being the first step.
Over the past 30 years, starting from the days Saddam's army invaded Kuwait, Iraqi football both domestically and internationally has stagnated and fallen behind, even when comparing it to surrounding countries, and this had slowly been acknowledged by football experts and analysts in the country, with the Iraqi FA president looking to address it.
Casas will play a significant part in this, as will his assistants, and while forming a new side to qualify for the 2026 World Cup is the main objective, the Spanish coach and his staff will also bring much more than that, or so the Iraqi FA hopes.
The WM
In the summer of 1955, the sports department of the Iraqi armed forces advertised for a new trainer to supervise the national Army team. The man who was given the role was former Northern Ireland right-back and ex-Peru coach William Cook. Iraqi football then, as it is today, was in need of new ideas and the ex-Celtic and Everton full-back introduced the British WM to the Iraqi game and other methods that would benefit the local game for decades. This is what Adnan Dirjal is hoping the appointment of Casas will do.
I cannot see Casas implementing everything he wants over the four-year period nor do I envisage the new coach introducing tiki-taka football to the Iraqi game any time soon, Iraq simply doesn't have the players for that kind of football, which would take at least a generation, in the same vein that Javier Clemente's Spain of Abelardo, José Luis Caminero and Julio Salinas, could never have played like the Spain of 2008, 2010 or 2012. But seeing Iraqi football through new eyes and being willing to change how the game is coached or played is a start and a positive one at that.
Sé abierto en tus decisiones y deja que sean tuyas
My only advice to the coach would be to trust his own eyes and ears, and not to rely on what others tell him, which in the past has proved costly, and for the first year to trust his instincts and expertise to analyse football in the country.
Iraq's trusted caretaker coach Radhi Shanaishel made similar comments in his final post-match statement after the 0-0 draw with Ecuador in Madrid, insisting the FA should give the new coach freedom to select the players he wants, to avoid the same "confusion" under previous national coaches, alluding to former FA officials putting in their choices or opinions on player selections and in some cases even interfering in calling up certain players.
The friendlies this month, Iraq's own mini-World Cup with Mexico, Ecuador and Costa Rica, have little relevance other than highlighting the state of the Iraqi team and where it is at present. The performance and results against Mexico (0-4) and Ecuador (0-0) are tinged with both concern and optimism.
I expect many of the players in the current squad, over the next 24 months, will likely be moved on by the new coach, with several, even the seniors, not at the level expected of them,
The appointment of Jesús Casas is about rebuilding and even after 'the ageing' players were dropped after the 2022 World Cup qualifiers, Iraq's senior players such as Bashar Resan (28 years), Amjad Atwan (29), Ayman Hussein (30), Ali Faiz (28), Alaa Abbas (29), Saad Natiq (32), Ali Adnan (31), etc, will have to be replaced in the near future, along with Mustafa Nadhim (31), Ahmed Yasin (31) and Dhargham Ismail (30), who Casas called up for the Costa Rica game.
If Casas can somehow form a team from the best players from the Iraqi League and the crop of the top European-based players, harmonising them both, something his predecessors failed to do after the introduction of the idea after the 2011 Asian Cup under Wolfgang Sidka, Iraq could have a realistic chance of reaching their first World Cup finals since 1986, especially with Asia's allocation increasing to eight places for the next World Cup. Depending solely on local league players will not be enough, with the level and quality of the Iraqi league deteriorating over the years on the Asian stage.
The previous coach Srečko Katanec shunned the idea completely presumably after seeing the disharmony it would brought between the two factions of local league and European-based players while Dick Advocaat was criticised for relying too much on his coaching staff to monitor the European-based players and allowing interference by team supervisors and his assistant coach on their selections.
Željko Petrović, a confusing and muddled figure, who could barely pronounce the names of players ("Ahmed Jason" and "Jival" presumably meaning Ahmed Yasin and Jiloan Hamad), let alone know how many matches they had played, sounded more like a local league coach after spending time in Baghdad, lamenting that the European based players “do not love Iraq” or fight for it like the local league players.
The new coach has done his homework on players even monitoring Ameen Al-Dakhil, Hussein Ali and Aimar Sher, who are currently registered to play for Belgium and Sweden, demonstrating he is ahead of former coaches who depended on the FA and its appointed coaches to hand them lists on European-based players.
Casas should stay away from the measures and steps of every one of his predecessors and rely on his own judgement and be open in his thinking which will endear to the Iraqi fans and the footballing community as a whole. Casas has to be his own man, make his own decisions, and avoid the Iraqi FA imposing an Iraqi assistant to work on his staff.
Even if things do not go as the Iraqi FA plans, the appointment of Casas will open a new chapter in football in Iraq, something it has desperately needed for a long time, innovation, a new outlook and a coach that has a very different vision of how the game should be played. Bienvenidos señor Jesús Casas.