Not a Nice Man

A week or so back we posted a few comments from Sunderland keeper Craig Gordon describing how the Black Cats players enjoy the chance to kick Roy Keane when he gets involved in 5-a-side. They might’ve thought Keano was a hard coach, but even the great leg-breaker has nothing on this fearsome chap. He is in fact our number one football bastard, a man who was quite literally a lawless, inhumane tyrant.

Yes, Uday Hussein was Saddam’s son, but his official title was Head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, meaning that he oversaw all sports development in the country for a good few years, distributing what he saw as reasonable punishment to athletes whenever their performances failed to meet his somewhat lofty expectations. According to widespread reports, he had a team of torturers who beat and caned the soles of footballers’ feet with electrical cable while they did press-ups. Sitting up in the stands, Uday reportedly kept scorecards with written instructions on how many times each player should be lashed after a poor performance. All of sudden Frank Lampard’s decision to turn down an offer to switch allegiance to Iraq becomes all the clearer.

One defector further reports that jailed soccer players were forced to repeatedly just kick a concrete ball after failing to reach the 1994 World Cup finals, while another claims that underwhelming forwards who failed to score were dragged through a gravel pit and subsequently immersed in, ahem, bodily fluids to infect their wounds! Iraq's captain at the time, Habib Jaffar, has recently described an additional bizarre punishment: he said that he was once made to climb a 20-foot ladder and leap into a vat of sewage over and over again in front of Hussein; now bear in mind that’s after he’d already been imprisoned and had the feet-whipping thing. If all that provided insufficient motivation for the players, Hussein also was known to give obscenely threat-laden half-time team talks through a speaker phone wired into the dressing room. Can you imagine that? You’re a goal down but on the offensive, getting fired up before the second-half, when all of a sudden a disembodied voice just booms out:“if you don’t win this game I will burn your children alive in front of you.” Not ideal.

For completeness’ sake then, other non-football-related allegations leveled at Hussein during his time in office include:

• The regular kidnapping and raping of young Iraqi girls, often in front of their husbands before killing them both

• Pretty selfish stock-piling in an era of widespread privation. When troops captured his mansion in Baghdad, they genuinely found a personal zoo (stocked to the brim with lions and cheetahs), an underground garage full of more than a thousand luxury cars, paintings glorifying him and his mother with Saddam, Cuban cigars inscribed with his name, and finally millions of dollars worth of fine wines, imported liquor and heroin

• The use of an iron maiden on persons who irritated him just for his own personal amusement i.e. he’d lock them in a cabinet and cut them, not just play them noisy 80s rock

• Actually driving a pink Rolls-Royce

You’ll be pleased to hear that Hussein was (perhaps justly) murdered horribly a few years ago when futuristic US helicopters and 200 ultra-hard Marines raided his palace armed with rocket launchers and 50-cal machine guns. To be fair to him though, the standard of the Iraq national team has dropped significantly since he stopped keeping them in jail infected with hepatitis…