News in 2006
18th January 2006
LuaLua Heads to Africa Under Double Pressure
In Italy, performers wearing costumes from Federico Fellini's 1970 film "The Clowns" will bring down the final curtain on the Turin Winter Olympics in February.
In Africa, they need nothing more than the human story of the continent's migrant players to give the African Cup of Nations its extra dimension.
Lomana Tresor LuaLua, a striker who captains the Democratic Republic of Congo and leads from the front when the 25th tournament of Africa starts in Cairo this weekend, has compelling reasons to be there.
"Football is the only thing that unites the country," he said. "That's why I have to be in Egypt."
His heart and body will be with Congo when he kicks off against Togo at the Military Academy Stadium on Saturday. Part of him, however, will be left behind in England, where he has lived since he was 10 years old, and where his club, Portsmouth, fights a desperate relegation struggle in the Premier League.
"What can I do?" he asks. "Its like two people trying to cut you in half."
LuaLua is a complex personality.
On the field, he is unfathomable. He plays like a free spirit, he obeys tunes in his head that are not always fully engaged with any team plan; he is fast, unpredictable, acrobatic, daring.
And when he scores, even though his English coaches have tried to persuade him that one celebratory somersault is enough, four are positively dangerous, the exuberance of the childhood appears thankfully unsuppressed.
Yet his is no simple soul, and he is not simply a soccer entertainer.
This week coincides with the fifth anniversary of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the military ruler of Congo, being shot to death by one of his own bodyguards in the Marble Palace above Kinshasa.
That was the city of LuaLua's birth, when it was in Zaire. The family moved to east London before the civil war, but some relatives remain and they were allegedly threatened after Lomano was sent off at the start of the last African Nations Cup two years ago.
"I was young, I was stupid," he said last week of that rash act in Tunisia in 2004 when he caused a mini riot by kicking a Tunisian player, Jawhar Mnari, and then assaulting Mnari as he was being carried off on a stretcher. LuaLua thought Mnari was feigning injury.
There were some in Kinshasa who considered him hot-headed and unreliable, and some who believed he cynically had himself red carded to avoid staying in the tournament so he could return to his English club at the time, Newcastle.
He was, in any event, made the scapegoat for Congo's failure at that tournament.
"I want to show everyone back home," he told reporters before flying to Cairo, "that I am not the arrogant, angry player they thought I was."
At 25, he is not so young anymore and not so forgetful. A year ago, he further enraged his countrymen by failing to turn up for a World Cup qualifier against South Africa. There were 120,000 fans at the Martyrs Stadium in Kinshasa, but no LuaLua.
He promised Claude Le Roy, the Frenchman who coaches the team, he would be there. He had forgotten to renew his passport.
Another moment of forgetfulness cost him dearly last year. He returned to Congo in the summer but neglected to take his anti-malaria tablets. After playing poorly at the start of the English season he was diagnosed with malaria and hospitalized.
"My mother was just sitting there crying, not sleeping," he said. "I had eight drips in me. Being a Christian family, we prayed a lot. I came out of that, and I pushed myself to get better."
He returned to the Portsmouth team just as the coach, Alain Perrin, was fired. His new club coach Harry Redknapp, suddenly given new resources by a Russian investor to buy fresh players, has no time to wait for LuaLua's return from Africa.
Yet, there are priorities even beyond the Premier League status of this, his third English club in an already nomadic career. LuaLua is a patron of the Show Racism the Red Card campaign in England, and he actively supported the plight of a Congolese asylum seeker in England.
More than that, he has a foundation. The Foundation Tresor LuaLua has so far, he says, cost him £100,000, or $176,000. He is building a hostel, sport and education drop-in center in Kinshasa, where he intends to employ nine full-time staff by the end of 2006.
"God has given me a talent, but I mustn't keep it to myself," he said on his pre-Nations Cup press day last week. "What I have seen on my visits back home has sent me to my hotel room crying.
"Kids as young as 13 are on the street risking AIDS and HIV because they are forced into prostitution. Boys have nothing to do and might turn to guns. In hospitals there are old people, abandoned by their families.
"Sometimes, I ask God what I did to be given a gift that makes me so lucky."
Lucky in life, but caught up in the eternal club versus country demands. Held up as a some kind of a hero to the youth, but blamed to the point of threats on his life if things go wrong on the pitch.
To many of us, LuaLua at play makes it seem such a simple, carefree world. When he talks, simplicity is a world away.
Source: International Herald Tribune
