2023-09-13 01:26:13
Emotion and solidarity. Four days after the earthquake which left more than 2,900 dead, the Moroccan selection faced Burkina Faso this Tuesday evening in a preparatory friendly match for the 2024 African Cup of Nations. This meeting was played in a Félix-Bollaert stadium in Lens which was almost full with more than 35,000 people. As soon as the game was confirmed, the idea of taking advantage of the opportunity to collect donations emerged. The Liévin Association for the Fight for Equality, Against Discrimination and for Solidarity (ALEDS) has obtained authorization to park a semi-trailer in front of the stadium from 5 p.m. and have ballot boxes at each entrance.
Quickly, spectators went there to deposit money or bring equipment. Donations (duvets, dressings, clothes, medicines) were immediately loaded into a truck to travel to Algeciras, Spain, by road and then to Morocco by boat. “It’s a special moment, all the support goes to Morocco. We think of all those who are there, who have left us,” says Soraya, who came with her family.
Morocco supporters came en masse to Stade Bollaert. (Photo by Ayoub Benkarroum / AFP) AFP or licensors
It’s 8:30 p.m. The two teams enter the pitch for the kick-off to a huge clamor followed by a minute of silence under a screen displaying “All with the victims of the earthquake”. Emotion surges in the stands in the colors of the bereaved country. “All Morocco, all in solidarity, tribute to the victims,” proclaims a banner displayed from the stands where red dotted with green dominates. “Thank you for France which is always next to the Moroccans, in celebration as well as in suffering,” says Saïd Saïdi, a forty-year-old, wearing the jersey of the Moroccan team. »
The Royal Moroccan Football Federation announced that all revenues from the match would be paid to the “Special Fund for the management of the effects of the earthquake that hit the Kingdom”. The majority of tickets were purchased by the community of Moroccans living abroad, she said. Before reaching the stadium, Fatiha El Gazouani, a liberal, Franco-Moroccan nurse, brought crutches, a walker, boxes of painkillers and compresses.
The prayerful celebration of Ounahi
Even more than other regions in France, where the earthquake triggered a wave of solidarity, Nord-Pas-de-Calais maintains very strong links with Morocco, a French protectorate between 1912 and 1956. Some 80,000 Moroccans recruited by Middlemen came there between the 1950s and 1970s to work in the coal mines.
A few minutes before the break, Morocco opened the scoring through OM striker Azzedine Ounahi. A new moment of emotion. The players rush to the scorer to congratulate him before kneeling near the corner post to pray. This will be the only goal of this meeting where the essential was obviously elsewhere.
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