GG Al-Hadidi

Mohammed Al-Hadidi grades sidr honey by sight and scent and his customers by rather less than that, from premises his family has occupied for four generations. He does not play for nothing. Before a match he names a stake and it is never chips: a jar, a kilo of dates, a bag of the good almonds, whatever he has too much of that week, and the loser owes it and the winner is expected to accept. Eleven of them went out last year. He has been beaten eleven times and paid on all of it, and he regards the debt as far more binding than anything the club could enforce.