In 2001, exactly 50 years after the Iraqi national team was formed, I made a discovery. I was reading a comment on the old sports forum about a player named Saeed Easho. It was the start to unearthing the story of Iraq’s first national team.
Many years later I contacted the ex-footballer, and through him it seemed as if everything fell into place. He had spent the best part of 60 years living outside Iraq so no one knew what had happened to the centre-half of Iraq’s first national side.
This is how it all began: the sons of a former British army officer, an Eastern Orthodox priest and an Assyrian Levy soldier were the three men who shaped the side.
The team was formed like the modern-day nation of Iraq, shaped from the old Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. There was the outside left Percy Lynsdale from Baghdad, Basrawi centre-half Saeed Easho and the Mosul-born inside-left Aram Karam.
Saeed Easho was the son of an Eastern Orthodox priest who retired at the age of 23 to pursue a career in engineering. Only four months after pulling on the Iraqi jersey, Saeed left to study at Loughborough College in Leicestershire, England. He enrolled in September 1951, and at the time there were teachers from Sheffield taking courses at the college.
They had heard about the Iraqi national team player and, knowing the management at Sheffield United were searching for nplayers, they got in touch with the club and informed them about the centre-half.
During the Christmas holidays, Saeed received a telegram from the Sheffield club. They had offered him a trial. So off he went with a fellow Iraqi student and they travelled 52 miles north to Bramall Lane. On Christmas Day, the Sheffield United ‘A’ side were at home and took on Barnsley in the Yorkshire Football League. The 23-year-old Iraqi electrical engineering student from Loughborough College played the 90 minutes as they won 5-4 and after the game the management called him over and asked if he would join.
As it meant he would have had to leave college to take a risk on a professional football career, Saeed politely declined. The Second Division club had offered him a good salary compared with what players were earning during that period and more than he would have ever earned in his playing career in Iraq. However, it was not enough to make him change his mind. Sheffield United paid the cost of Saeed’s trip from Loughborough and they parted ways.
The talented Percy Lynsdale was one of only a handful of British footballers at the time playing for Iraqi teams in Basra such as Al-Minaa and the B.P.C team. However, Iraq-born Percy, being the son of an Iraqi-naturalised father of English origin and an Iraqi mother, was eligible to play for Iraq. He became Iraq’s very own Tom Finney, the famous outside-right of Preston North End, who played for England in the 1950s.
Percy had not been forgotten by officials from Baghdad’s ministry of education when he had captained the Baghdad College team in his senior year. He had studied at the Jesuits Baghdad College on the east bank of the Tigris river, with Percy having been one of the first names on the school team. He had been one of the boys who had spent his afternoons kicking a ball on school grounds, throwing down their jackets as goalposts, which were later replaced with benches.