Neville Southall: “What you take on to the pitch apart from anything else is the dreams of every other person in Palestine. That is a wonderful honour to be able to take on the pitch.”
Mohammed Bassim Rashid: “I really agree with you. Thank you so much for these words – I don’t know what to say, I am speechless.”
Any Evertonian in middle age or beyond will have their favourite Neville Southall moment. Many will name that save from Mark Falco’s header at White Hart Lane in April1985. Some may go for the turn-back-the-clock display in the 1995 FA Cup ï¬nal victory over Manchester United – after which he famously didn’t bother staying for the banquet but drove home to North Wales… stopping en route to pick up some Man Utd fans whose car had broken down and drive them to the nearest garage.
Of course, regulars on ToffeeWeb don’t need telling the details of Nev’s giant contribution to Everton’s history. They will know too about his big-hearted support for causes of various kinds. When interviewing Nev for my book on Everton in the 1980s, Here We Go, I saw him at work in his old job at a pupil referral unit in Ebbw Vale. When we began collaborating on a regular column for the i newspaper, I saw him address a Unison rally in Barry. It’s a different Nev from the one I saw ï¬ring out expletives and putdowns to a room of chuckling Evertonians at a Q&A at The Bridewell the Denbigh Castle pub in Liverpool in November.
That razor-tongued Nev is hilarious, of course. But the Nev I saw during a recent Zoom interview for his 90 Minutes with Neville Southall podcast ï¬lled me with more admiration than ever for the man with the most Everton appearances of all.
Nev’s podcast has been running for a couple of years – supported by a rotating cast of talented Blues including Keith and Leigh Mullin, Dave Fehily, Melanie Harvey and James Rogers (as well as the Arsenal-supporting Secret Drug Addict) – and for this ï¬rst episode of 2024, he welcomed as his guest a Palestine national-team footballer, Mohammed Bassim Rashid.
Palestine are currently competing at the Asian Cup in Qatar and Mohammed joined us to talk about the significance of their participation amid Israel’s assault on Gaza and the rising settler violence in the West Bank, where he is from. He shared with us many painful details. When Palestine’s Olympic team general manager, Hani Al- Masdar, was killed by an IDF bomb in early January, that took to almost 70 the number of Gaza’s football community killed by Israel in the past three months. Mohammed told us: “We have lost many players who play in the Gazan league and players that play on the futsal national team because many of the futsal players come from Gaza.”
He touched too on the Al-Yarmouk football stadium – “the oldest stadium in Palestine” – now destroyed and turned into a prison camp. “They’re humiliating the people and searching them naked. It is an unbelievable thing to see. Honestly they’re destroying Palestinian football and not only football but sports in general – we have lost people who are in the national team of different sports like judo and karate.”
The conversation led on to the killing of his close friend Noor Alkurd, a 26- year-old video editor. “He and his family were hiding in a small room and a rocket fell on them,” Mohammed said. “His family died right away. He lived for another two days but he was suffering. He saw it coming. He kept telling me in messages: ‘It’s any time now’.
“When my friend was alive, I would call him. He was going to the sea to get water in buckets and they were heating the water up to get the salt out so they could drink water as they had no other choice. There is no water, no food, nothing.”
We heard also about the everyday troubles faced by Palestinian people before this current conflict – from humiliations at checkpoints to Mohammed’s experience of playing in a cup ï¬nal in the West Bank last year when Israeli soldiers “just started throwing tear-gas bombs onto the pitch”. It was a conversation for which I had a list of questions; Nev had nothing more than his curiosity about people – and that deep store of humanity. And it turned out he wasn’t just interviewing Mohammed but inspiring him at the same time:
“When you go out on that pitch, the steps you take, there will be God knows how many Palestinians stepping alongside you mentally … the freedom you are giving them for 90 minutes is the freedom that you’ve got on the pitch.”
The response of Mohammed? “I’ve never heard that from even a coach of mine. This is the ï¬rst time I’ve heard this. Really, thank you – I am going to write that in my notebook just to keep reading it before I sleep.”
Afterwards, Mohammed sent me a WhatsApp message saying: “Thank you so much for the amazing interview.” That was all Nev’s doing. His ability to connect with this 28-year-old Palestinian footballer, to stir his spirit, was something to behold. It is a conversation worth listening to when the episode goes live this week.
Right now I can’t think of a better Neville Southall moment.
Click here to access 90 Minutes with Neville Southall
Note: The comment threads below inevitably involve discussion of the current conflict in Gaza. If you are not interested in the Israel-Palestine question and would prefer to stick to football, stop reading here.