team bilad seet

Dar's a lazy, sortah hazy/ Feelin’ grips me, thoo an’ thoo;/ An’ I feels lak doin’ less dan enythin’;/ Dough de saw is sharp an’ greasy,/ Dough de task et han’ is easy,/ An’ de day am fair an’ breezy,/ Dar’s a thief dat steals embition in de win’.
Sprin’ Fevah, Ray G. Dandridge

Bilad Seet might be little more than a bump in the mountains, accessible over hours of dirt track, but it does sport its own football pitch, perhaps the only patch flattened for as far as the eye can see. Even the village doesn’t have so much blank space.

It is here that you will find Ahmed bin Hamood bin Saleh al Dohli, a 17 year old defender in a purple jersey, who hopes to go to Muscat after he finishes school to become a professional football player. Till then, he makes do with the mountain: running four kilometres a day over its slopes, playing in the evenings on the pitch, under distant peaks. Bilad Seet sports around 30 young players, and the size of the teams that play here each day is determined by how many young men turn up in the evening. Teams from Rustaq and Wadi Sahtan come here to play sometimes, and everyone pays his own expenses when travelling for a tournament, or training.

Team Bilad Seet got their field 12 years ago, after asking the local road department to level it out between the rock walls. They’ve beaten Tikha twice, but they’ve got a long way to go: they’re ranked second last in the mountains, after Tikha. In order of superiority, the teams that play each other include Rustaq, Al Hamra, Wadi Sahtan and then the last two – which are also the only ones which sport single teams.

Ahmed al Dohli dreams big, but most players from the mountain villages never go beyond the regional fields, like Zaher Abdullah Zaher al Dohli, who dribbles through the field alongside Ahmed, when he’s off from his naval posting in Musandam.

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