After carrying Qatar on their anything-but-smooth road to North America, Akram Afif will be a crucial cog in the 2022 hosts’ aspirations to do better against the odds.
It took half an hour for the crowd to get there, but the inevitable occurred. Akram Afif chose his moment and rose to it, this time with the number ten on his back and the captain’s armband on his sleeve. His two strikes in the second half felt naturally emblematic of the transition that Qatar would have ideally hoped and plotted for.
Against Kuwait in March 2024, the newly crowned Asian champions began life after Hassan Al-Haydos and a project under Bartolome Marquez Lopez. After all, what could go wrong with the best player in Asia leading the charge and under a manager who had managed to jigsaw his way to Asian Cup triumph despite being appointed on the eve of the tournament?
Except everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. Now, somehow, they are at a World Cup with Marquez Lopez now a distant memory. The campaign since that night at the Jassim bin Hamad Stadium was desperate enough in parts that Al-Haydos had to come out of retirement simply because the situation demanded a familiar presence.
Afif has felt like the only constant in the faltering campaign that saw Qatar burn through two managers and appoint former Spanish head coach Julen Lopetegui.
The Al Sadd winger had 19 goal contributions in 16 games in qualifying, capping off with two assists against the UAE in the ultimate clash en route to the World Cup. Afif’s floated delivery found Boualem Khoukhi for the opener, and his free-kick curled perfectly for Pedro Miguel to head home with sixteen minutes remaining in what turned out to be a historic night for the Maroons.
That quality is what has made the 29-year-old indispensable for Qatar. It has gone beyond the ability to be brilliant, and Afif has managed to leave his fingerprints on results when brilliance is not quite there.
He arrives at this World Cup carrying that quality and everything that comes with it, the primary one being able to grab a moment and shine on it. Another Asian Player of the Year title has come in the process, and so have multiple Qatari Footballer of the Year awards, taking his tally up to five. The major difference, maybe, is the fact that he is now required to produce those as the go-to talisman.
It serves in Qatar’s favour that the last tournament they entered without great conviction and a post-disappointment phase was the AFC Asian Cup 2023. The home side left as champions largely because Afif decided it would be so.
The campaign was turbulent throughout, and Qatar were far from being the most dominant side. They had Afif, who finished as the tournament’s highest scorer and converted three penalties in the final at Lusail Stadium before sweeping the individual honours on offer.
“The award is not my priority. My priority is to win with the team, the tournaments, any cups,” he said that in May, after accepting the latest in a long line of individual recognitions, his sixth QFA Player of the Year title. There is a sense in the Qatari capital that Afif’s evolution has made him a more complete and mature player capable of defying odds.
In North America, expectations on Afif, therefore, will naturally segway into healing the 2022 World Cup’s wounds. In a tournament that Qatar arrived as the best-drilled hosts the tournament had ever seen, the product of a decade of deliberate construction under Felix Sanchez, the pressure of performing in front of their own proved too much. Three games, three defeats, the manner of each more unsettling than the last.
“There was a lot of pressure in 2022,” Afif’s teammate Pedro Miguel would later admit. “There was immense pressure to do well. We didn’t play the way our fans expected.”
Afif, the player everyone looked to, could not carry them through, his expression ahead of the opener against Ecuador perhaps the most telling. The eyes fixed forward, jaw set, perhaps the pressure readable on a face that had not yet gotten used to it.
This time, however, the conditions are almost entirely different and not necessarily in Qatar’s favour. There is no home crowd, no years of meticulous preparation, no safety net of familiarity, and opportunities to measure themselves against superior opponents, reigning World champions Argentina and Serbia, were derailed after the war in the Middle East.
As Martin Lowe put it on The Asian Game Podcast, Qatar arrive with no settled system. They have come through a qualifying campaign that required desperate measures to survive and have not yet looked remotely as routed under Lopetegui as they were under Sanchez heading to the tournament at home in 2022.
But if a counterargument exists for Qatar, then it wears the number ten. Afif has spent the better part of three years finding ways to matter in campaigns that should, by most reasonable measures, have fallen apart. The thread to triumph for Al Sadd in the last two league campaigns ran directly through him, and so did the World Cup qualifying.
Whether that is enough against the opposition, Qatar have struggled at this level, in conditions that offer none of the comforts of home, and it is a steep mountain to climb. This is not a squad built to go deep at a World Cup, and Lopetegui, for all his experience, has had months rather than years to shape it. Qatar could exit early, and it would surprise nobody given how their defence has fared recently.
But football has a habit of not caring what surprises nobody. And somewhere in that Maroon shirt, if the pattern is to start again, the shoulder drop will come. By the time anyone recognises it, it will already be too late.
