‘Sir! Sir! Sir! Atlas Lions’ and other things Moroccan

The sheer joy around this victory was both personal and collective at the same time

We all love those stories in which an outcast or bullied child is given an opportunity to show their true self. Their strength, their worth. We love those stories because they are universally relatable. Those stories are like a caring hand tearing down a dusty old curtain from a window overlooking a small meadow where we once kept our now-unfulfilled dreams. These were my initial thoughts when I attempted to gauge the inimitable joy surrounding the Moroccan national team’s – aka Atlas Lions – victory over Portugal and advance to the semi-finals of the World Cup 2022. The sheer joy around this victory was both personal and collective at the same time. A collective win for Arabs, for Muslims, for Africans – and anyone else who has ever been bullied.

Morocco, in a plot twist that would appear amateurish and cliché in a novel, will face France in the semi-finals. Life is an amateur, this turn of events reminds us. It is comforting in some ways, no?