Any player knows the pain of missing a penalty, but for a member of the national team, it carried the certainty of ritual humiliation, imprisonment, and torture. Only three Iraqis dared to take penalties, and Zair was one of them.

"Many of the footballers refused to even touch the ball, but then we realised that if no one accepted we would all be punished," the midfielder said.

He missed. Two days after the team returned to Baghdad, Zair was summoned to the headquarters of the country's Olympic committee, the lair of Uday Hussein, eldest son of Saddam and the leading personality in Iraqi sport.

He was blindfolded, and taken away to a prison camp for three weeks. He shrugged: "End of story."

But it's just the beginning. Now that American tanks are on the streets of Baghdad, and Uday has fled with the rest of his father's regime, the full tale of the Iraq football team can be told.

The sporting life, as described to the Guardian by four past and present players, was one where motivational lectures from Uday - as chairman of the Iraqi football federation - included threats to cut off players' legs and throw them to ravenous dogs. Missing practice sessions, even to attend a sick child or funeral, meant prison. A loss or a draw brought flogging with electric cable, or a bath in raw sewage. And always at the back of the players' minds was the knowledge that Uday was watching.

A red card was particularly dangerous. Three years ago, Yasser Abdul Latif, a former captain, was accused of hitting the referee in a club match in Baghdad. He was taken to the Radwaniya prison camp, on the edges of the capital, and confined to a cell two metres square, with a tiny window high in the wall.

His head and eyebrows were shaved, and he was stripped to the waist. He was then ordered to perform press-ups for two hours. Three guards flogged him with lengths of electric cable, spelling off when their arms grew tired.

The torture continued, in two-hour sets with an hour's break in between, and the beatings grew more savage as Latif tired. The only relief, if it can be called that, came when he was led outdoors into the winter cold, and doused in freezing water.

Latif was at Radwaniya for two weeks. When he was released, he was unable to sleep on his back for a month. "Really Iraq was a big jail," he said. "But I never had any choice. They threatened me. If I didn't participate in the team, they said they would beat me again and again, and consider me an enemy of the regime, and that would mean death."

Although the torture of footballers was common knowledge in sporting circles, it evaded international scrutiny. Players described elaborate preparations to dupe Fifa investigators, who visited Iraq, with officials hiding those players still carrying the scars from recent beatings.

It is difficult to comprehend why Uday set such store by football. He was never much of an athlete, and he knew almost nothing about the game, according to members of the Iraq squad.

But he latched on to football in the mid-80s - before his reputation for brutality grew so extreme that even Saddam ruled him out as a suitable heir - as a means to establishing some kind of popularity in Iraq. He appointed himself chairman of the Olympic committee, and of the football federation, cementing his hold over the country's sport further with his stewardship of the Ba'ath party sports paper. Later, players say, Uday saw the game only as a source of cash; and after he was badly wounded in a 1996 assassination attempt, he became consumed by hate.

As football overseer, Uday kept a private torture scorecard, with written instructions on how many times each player should be beaten on the soles of his feet after a particularly poor showing. However, he did not bloody his own hands.

Punishment



The dispensation of punishment was subcontracted out to his spies among team officials and Iraqi army officers and police. His proxies included, among others: Adib Shaban, a photographer, who was taken on as Uday's secretary, Samir Borhan, who was attached to the team, and Adnan Hamman, a footballing official, who were feared in their own right. "No one else had the authority to give such orders unless they spoke in the name of Uday," said Habib Jaffar, the long-serving and long-suffering Iraqi captain.

Uday confined his direct interventions to half-time talks, bellowing obscenities and threats over the speaker phone. However, he did make a point of summoning the entire team once or twice a season to his offices, or to a riverside palace.

He would enter with half a dozen armed men and launch into a harangue, singling out individual players and mercilessly dissecting their performance. Only Uday spoke. Star performers, such as Jaffar, familiar to an entire generation of children from his picture on packets of chewing game, were singled out for particular punishment. "I was punished more than anyone else," he said. His multiple incarcerations included the standard beatings with lengths of electric cable while performing press-ups, being made repeatedly to climb a 20-metre ladder and jump into a vat of raw sewage, and to trap mosquitos on pain of more beatings.

"Once you came to Uday's notice, he never left you alone. The only time I managed to get away from his eyes was when I went outside Iraq."

However, even that escape - through a five-year contract to play for Qatar in the mid-90s - carried a price. Jaffar was forced to sign over 40% of his salary to Uday - standard fee for Iraqi footballers who gained contracts abroad.

"He never let us quit or retire," said Jaffar. "And we were never able to play well because all these threats and bad treatment made us very tense."

Now that Uday has fled, footballers are hoping those days of terror and humiliation are behind them. But for Jaffar, now 36, it's too late. "I wish I were 20 again so that I could show how well I could play," he said.