Frustrated Iraq coach considers future

BAGHDAD (Reuters) -- Many football managers moan about their jobs but few can match Bernd Stange's complaints. His driver was shot a few days ago, he has funded his team from his own pocket and he has not been paid since January.

Stange, a German, coaches Iraq's national team. Despite the violence and disorder racking the country, his side qualified top of their group for the Asian Soccer Championships and now rank 52nd in the world, better than Scotland, Wales or Austria.

But Stange says he is fed up working with meagre resources and accuses the U.S.-led occupying coalition of failing to support his work, which he argues could go a long way to bringing a sense of normality and national pride back to Iraq.

"I'm tired of begging for money for my players and for myself," he told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

"I'm thinking about my personal future," he said. "I can't hold on much longer."

After his team qualified for the Asian Championships by topping their group, Stange complains, they did not receive "even a phone call, a bouquet of flowers or a letter" from Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer, even though soccer is the country's most popular sport.

Stange himself helped persuade a German sports equipment firm to kit out his team. He says he is organising foreign tours on his own -- paying his own bills for his mobile satellite phone -- without any help from the occupying authorities.

"No one is asking: 'how can we help?'," he said.

But the occupying coalition says the harsh reality is that there is not much cash to go round at the moment in a society devastated by war, sanctions and dictatorial rule.

"We simply do not have more money to pass on," said Mark Clark, a British adviser to Iraq's Ministry for Youth and Sport.

He also said it was Iraqi sports officials who allocated the money they received from the ministry, not the coalition.

But he said the coalition was working on getting coaching help and donations from foreign soccer bodies which would benefit the national team.

SIGNED FOR SOCCER

Stange signed up for the national team a year ago, when Saddam Hussein was still in power, attracting considerable criticism back home in Germany. He stresses he no way supported Saddam or his notorious son Uday, who ran Iraq's sports sector.

"I signed the contract as a football coach, not as a politician," he said.

Stange knows there are more important things in Iraq right now than football and some of his problems are less to do with sport and more to do with the post war instability in general.

Many of his best players are moving abroad because they can earn a far better living there than in Iraq's depressed economy.

Soccer authorities cannot re-establish the national league because they fear trouble in crowds full of men carrying guns. A recent attempt to start up a Baghdad championship had to be abandoned due to crowd violence, Stange said.

"There was a danger we would have people killed," he said. "The stadiums will have to have security like airports."

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