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Witness History

Algeria's rebel footballers

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.41.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During Algeria's War of Independence, a group of Algerian players secretly left their clubs in France to form their own national team. Some had already been selected to play for France in the upcoming World Cup Finals in 1958. In 2014, Saint Etienne striker, Rashid Mekhloufi, spoke to Mike Lanchin about the day that changed his footballing life.

Photo: The 1958 Algerian revolutionary team, reunited 30 years later. Rashid Mekhloufi is second from the right, front row

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

0:06.8

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

0:11.8

telly we share what we've been watching

0:14.0

Cladie Aide.

0:16.0

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

0:19.0

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

0:21.0

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

0:24.9

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and thank you for downloading Witness History from the BBC World Service.

0:40.1

All this week we've been hearing stories from Algeria's War of Independence.

0:45.0

In our final program we're going back to April 1958 when a group of top Algerian footballers

0:52.0

secretly abandon the clubs they were playing for in France

0:55.8

to join an Algerian national team.

0:59.0

The team's formation was considered a major coup for the independence movement.

1:04.0

Mike Lanchin spoke to one of the players involved. It was a

1:18.0

a atmosphere a player because it was the first front

1:21.0

that the national and was joue.

1:25.0

We were all weeping with emotion because it was the first time that the national anthem was played in a stadium

1:32.0

and the Algerian flag was hoisted in a stadium. The players of the FLN team, we were in tears, all of us.

1:40.0

In April 1958, some of France's leading Algerian-born footballers are lining up for a truly

1:46.9

historic and emotional match in Tunis. They're proudly sporting the colours of the anti-French guerrilla group, the Algerian National Liberation Front, FLN. Our shirts were green, our shorts were white and we wore the insignia of Algeria.

2:07.0

How I wish we'd kept one or two. and we wore the insignia of Algeria.

2:13.0

How I wish we'd kept one or two of those shirts.

...

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