By ANDI BALLA
If you followed the Albanian national football team throughout its history, you would know it always hovers at the bottom of the group in qualification rounds for important championships.
Every time it seems to be doing well, it follows it up with terrible performances. Every time it plays a great game against a famous adversary, it ends up loosing in the very last moments of the game.
So as an Albanian fan gets exited and hopeful about the future, the voice of reason comes in. “Give it up, Albania just doesn’t have it in football. Small country, bad players, no incentives, no history of achieving anything great,” it says.
But Albanians still pick up the flag, watch the game, sing the anthem, curse the adversaries, and carry on in small crowds or big ones, depending how important the visiting team is to the national psyche.
Football has a way of translating into real life. Or it maybe the other way around, but the fact remains that like its national football team, Albania itself just doesn’t seem to make the cut by European standards, always falling to the bottom.
And every time it goes in a good run, it fumbles.
Outside the former USSR, the country is still the poorest in Europe as it has been for decades. Ahead of its neighbors in EU and NATO integration in the early 1990s, Albania came up with the 1997 riots, which pushed the reset button, and again it was dead last.
Want visa-free travel? Not before every other country in the region gets it first. EU membership? Only with the very last envisioned enlargement wave.
It might be easy to blame the EU, but a good chunk of the reasons for these failures lay with Albania itself, and its habit of always falling behind.
And when the country gets some achievements like NATO membership, higher living standards, better roads, and maybe even some excitement and hope – the politicians are at each others throats, spiting out embarrassing insults that belong in the mouths of street thugs, not modern European leaders.
Just when everyone thought Albania was creating stable, normal political institutions almost 20 years after the fall of Communism, the parliament sits half empty, because the country can’t evolve enough to hold undisputed elections.
So it’s easy for that voice of reason to knock on the door again.
“Give it up, Albania just doesn’t have what it takes to be a prosperous EU member. It’s a small, poor country; it has bad leaders and no recent history of achieving anything great,” the voice says.
Yet, at the end this decade, Albanians still get up, look forward with optimism and muster some hope to imagine a day when things will be better, a day when they can call themselves EU citizens, a day when Albania can join the family of developed, modern democratic nations.
Albania might still be dead last on the road to Europe, but at least it is still on the road. It might keep loosing, but at least it hasn’t lost the will to play.
