Abdelhamid Kermali

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Kermali (crouching, 3rd from right) with members of the former FLN team in 1974

Abdelhamid "Hamid" Kermali (born April 24, 1931 in Sétif ; † April 13, 2013 ibid) was an Algerian - French football player and coach .

Club career

Kermali grew up in poor conditions in Algeria , which was then part of France ; from childhood he "bolted" more often on the streets than in school lessons. At the age of 13 he joined the USFM Sétif , and just over a year later he stormed the right winger in the men's eleven. At the end of the 1940s he also played for USM Algiers ; for this he was banned from the association for two years in 1950. On a tip, he traveled on his own to Alsace, where FC Mulhouse recognized his skills and successfully tried to reduce the suspension to one year. From 1951 Hamid Kermali played two brilliant years in the amateur league .

In 1953 the second division AS Cannes brought him for his professional team. On the Côte d'Azur , Kermali also met two other Algerians with whom he would play again a few years later, namely Mustapha Zitouni and Mokhtar Aribi . Cannes ended the two seasons only in the middle of the table, but the attacker was a regular from the start and scored 14 goals in 71 games. In 1954 they even made it into the last eight teams in the French Cup . A good twelve months later, Kermali had reached the top division : from the 1955/56 season his employer was called Olympique Lyon , and he was able to develop his skills better in a team with national players such as André Lerond , Ernest Schultz and Robert Mouynet . He was a mood cannon and very popular with players and fans, who gave him the nickname "Cheikh". In 1956, only a denied penalty prevented Lyons entry into the cup final; In the championship, Kermalis Elf brought it this as in the following year to a top midfield rank in the final classification, but he was far from winning the title there too.

On the second weekend in April 1958, a few game days before the end of the season, his career in French football ended abruptly when he secretly left Lyon for North Africa. Abdelhamid Kermali, like many other Algerian professional footballers, had decided to play for the selection team of the Algerian independence movement (FLN) in order to promote the independence of the French colony. There was no alternative for him to this step: his father had died as a French officer at the beginning of the Second World War during the German invasion ; on May 8, 1945, two of his brothers were fatally shot by the French police in the Sétif massacre . Since 1957 the war in Algeria became more and more brutal; therefore Kermali did not think twice when he was asked to participate in this "independence elf" . At her place he not only met his teammates from Cannes, Zitouni and Aribi, but also two French professionals, Amar Rouaï and Rachid Mekhloufi , with whom he had already kicked on the streets as a child in his hometown. The Tunis- based FLN selection had a good 80 encounters in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa up to 1962, and Kermali was one of their regular formation.

Stations

  • Union Sportive Franco-Musulmane de Sétif (from 1944, as a teenager)
  • Union Sportive de la Médina Alger (until 1950)
  • Football Club de Mulhouse (1951–1953, in CFA)
  • Association Sportive Cannes (1953–1955, in D2)
  • Olympique Lyonnais (1955 – April 1958, 65 games / 13 hits)
  • FLN selection (April 1958–1962)

Coaching career

After Algerian independence, Abdelhamid Kermali returned to Sétif in 1963; there he worked as the coach of Entente Sportive Setif , with whom he won the Algerian cup competition , which was held for the third time, after a 1-0 final victory over JSM Skikda in 1967 . In the following years he looked after other clubs in the country; He was particularly successful with the MC Alger , which he led in 1972 and again in 1999 to win the national championship title.

From the late 1970s he coached various national teams of the Fédération Algérienne de Football . In 1979 Algeria's young players qualified under his guidance for the Junior World Championship in Japan , where they failed in the quarter-finals against Argentina (with Diego Maradona ). From 1989 to 1992 he was responsible for the country's senior national team , with which he won the only major international title to date, won by the “Fennecs” - “Desert Foxes” is a common name for Algeria's national team. At the African Cup of Nations 1990 , the players led by Rabah Madjer and Chérif Oudjani defeated Nigeria 1-0 in the final and became continental champions. In 1996/97 and for part of 2001 Kermali held the office of national coach again - each time together with Abdelhamid Zouba , who had also played in the ex-FLN selection four decades earlier.

On his 75th birthday (2006) and on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the “Independence Elf” (2008), Abdelhamid Kermali took part in numerous events in Algeria that commemorated this team and its footballers. In April 2013, a few days before his 82nd birthday, Kermali died after a long illness.

Palmarès as a coach

  • Algerian champion: 1972, 1999 (with MC Algier)
  • Algerian Cup Winner: 1967 (with ES Sétif)
  • African national team champions: 1990 (with Algeria)

literature

  • Marc Barreaud: Dictionnaire des footballeurs étrangers du championnat professionnel français (1932–1997). L'Harmattan, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-7384-6608-7
  • L'Équipe / Gérard Ejnès: Coupe de France. La folle épopée. L'Équipe, Issy-les-Moulineaux 2007, ISBN 978-2-915-53562-4
  • Michel Nait-Challal: Dribbleurs de l'indépendance. L'incroyable histoire de l'équipe de football du FLN algérien. Ed. Prolongations, o. O. 2008, ISBN 978-2-9164-0032-7

Remarks

  1. ↑ Nait-Challal, pp. 12 and 29–33
  2. ↑ Barreaud, p. 77
  3. ↑ L'Équipe / Ejnès, p. 370
  4. ↑ L'Équipe / Ejnès, p. 372
  5. ↑ Nait-Challal, pp. 18ff.
  6. ↑ Numbers from Stéphane Boisson / Raoul Vian: Il était une fois le Championnat de France de Football. Tous les joueurs de la première division de 1948/49 à 2003/04. Neofoot, Saint-Thibault o. J.
  7. ↑ Nait-Challal, p. 231
  8. ↑ http://www.setif.info/article891.html
  9. ↑ Article with photo of Kermali (2006) under archive link ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ see the Former national football coach Abdelhamid Kermali passes away ( memento from April 29, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) on the website of the Algérie Presse Service
personal data
SURNAME Kermali, Abdelhamid
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kermali, Hamid (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Algerian-French soccer player and coach
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Sétif
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 2013
Place of death Sétif