WEST BANK: FOOTBALL/SOCCER - French football legend Thuram inaugurates Palestinian stadium

Record ID: 560121

  • Title: WEST BANK: FOOTBALL/SOCCER - French football legend Thuram inaugurates Palestinian stadium
  • Date: 15th April 2011
  • Summary: MAN PLAYING FLUTE PALESTINIAN FLAG
  • Embargoed: 30th April 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: West bank, West bank
  • City:
  • Country: Palestinian Territories
  • Topics: Sports
  • Reuters ID: LVADWN7KAP2VSNUQH6XQHEVM8UXP
  • Story Text: World Cup winning French defender Lilian Thuram continued his visit to the West Bank on Thursday (April 14), as a guest of the honour at the inauguration ceremony of a renovated Palestinian stadium.
    Thuram, invited to the West Bank by the Palestinian Football Association, arrived in the region on April 11, and has since been busy visiting local sport clubs and United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) educational facilities and projects.
    The chairman of the Palestine Football Association, Jibreel Rajoub said that through his visit to the West Bank, Thuram had been able to understand the difficult conditions that Palestinian players have to live through.
    "He lived over the course of four days in Palestine, he visited the majority of cities and got into contact with all the sectors of the Palestinian people. He met the President (referring to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas), ministers, head of clubs, athletes, professional players and amateurs, males and female. Surely, he formulated a picture on the conditions that a Palestinian player lives under," he told reporters during a news conference.
    Thuram, the most capped French player of all time with 142 appearances and member of their 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000-winning squads, inaugurated the Al-Bireh stadium which has been upgraded in the past four years to meet international standards. Construction of two of the seating sections was completed recently, with other two planned sections still under construction, a fact that will delay using the stadium for international matches.
    In the meantime, the planned 7,000 seat stadium is used by local clubs only.
    Thuram said that football has the ability to create bonds between people that politics cannot.
    "I myself through my athletic career have found, especially while playing for the French team in the World Cup, that football has the ability to create bonds that no politician can make. And thus I hope that the Palestinian team will improve thanks to the French trainers, and will be able to represent the Palestinian people," Thuram told reporters.
    According to the B'tselem NGO website, the renovation is estimated at three million Euros, funded by France, the German Development Bank, the UN Development Agency and FIFA.
    The Palestinian national squad is currently hosting international matches in the Al-Ram stadium, and it is unclear yet whether those will move to the Al-Bireh stadium after it is completed.
    In March, Palestine celebrated their first official match on home soil when their Under-21 side lost an Olympic Games qualifier to Thailand 6-5 on penalties. The fixture was viewed by Palestinians as another symbolic step towards confirming their credentials for the state they intend to establish in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
    Until October 2008, when they hosted Jordan in a friendly international at Al-Ram, Palestine played all their matches abroad because soccer's world governing body FIFA deemed the Palestinian territories unsafe to host visiting teams. The Palestinian league was also re-launched in 2008 following an improvement in the security situation.
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