At the first floor Sheraton bar, Mark Hughes (72 caps, 16 goals) was being berated by a fan. “What the fuck have you ever done for Welsh football? We’ve done fuck all in the last ten years.”

Consternation. One of the greatest figures in the history Welsh football was copping a mouthful. Remember, this was his first game in sole charge of the national team.

A fan – I’ll call him The Camel, not because he drinks like one, but because he’ll get the hump if named – continued ranting.

The coach, Mark Bowen (41 caps, three goals) tried to intervene with a view to calming matters, whatever they were, down.

The Camel turned to him and said: “And you can fuck off as well!”

Imagine it, you travel 3,500 miles to watch your team, Mark Hughes comes to thank you for turning up at such short notice, and doesn’t get the response he was expecting. Quite the opposite.

And I missed it all cos I was sitting on the loo. I would have rather enjoyed meeting Mr Hughes and still feel like I deserve something or other. If you’re reading this Mr Sparky, I’m free for a coffee any time. Let’s face it, all fans at the turn of the Millinnium deserved some sort of medal.

But our new leader had scarpered by the time my business was finished. Who can blame him? Another wonderful performance by the Welsh fans.

I emerged from the luxurious loos and found out I missed the infamous highlight of the trip. “You go all that way, the manager turns up to say hello and gets a rocket,” says another fan who witnessed the exchange but declines to be named.

“Just picture the scene. There’s a Filipino band in the bar, string quartet in the atrium of one of the most opulent hotels on the planet and the manager gets a mouthful from a tipsy fan – it was absolutely surreal.

“It just about summed up the essence of Welsh football at the time.”

So Wales, reduced to a pub team, perhaps had a few pub team fans in tow. Not me, obviously.

Mr Hughes is pictured, top, with Booze Crew members Bowser (RIP) and Tutt from Cardiff – neither was responsible for the, er, less than complimentary critique.

The Camel told me that he had bumped into the coaching team several weeks later and apologised for his outburst.

Match day

Wednesday February 23, 6pm kick-off. The game would be under floodlights.We got a free ticket. I didn’t keep mine for posterity but it was written on a piece of paper the size of a car park chit. It had some squiggle on it in Arabic, which probably said ‘Away fan’.

One of the FAW officials gave it to us in the Sheraton as though it were a gift from the Almighty. Perhaps, it was. Who am I to say it wasn’t?

I worked out after the game that its face value was 20p.

Qatar had played 19 games in the previous 17 months, winning eight, drawing six and losing five.

The first 17 of those matches, all of them played in 1998, were against the likes of Jordan, Saudi, UAE, with trips to the Maldives and Thailand where they had played six matches in 12 days in late 1998.

Stuff in the programme indicates they played no games in 1999 at all. None. What were they up to? Working on a building site, mixing concrete to build up their muscles as another skyscraper was erected?

In January 2000, the month before playing us, they lost 2-0 in Malta. That was pretty shit. Any side losing to Malta back then meant you were super-shit.

But maybe the concrete-mixing muscle building paid off. Because they then defeated Bosnia and Herzegovina in Doha by the same scoreline. A decent win.

The coach was ‘Jimmy’ Hadziabdic, the former Swansea player who perhaps was the initiator of moves to entice Wales to Doha. He had the job for the year. But the manager, according to the programme was Ahmed Alsulaiti. So, the expert runs the team, and the local is appointed as the overseer. A pattern in Qatari society perhaps?

Wales, arguably, were the biggest team they’d ever played. Hard to believer, but it could well be true. The mouth-watering prospect of seeing a major star, Ryan Giggs, in the flesh appeared to be in their grasp.

“I stravelled to Heathrow on the Sunday and called Ceri Stennett, the media contact for the FAW, as I was working for the BBC,” says Dylan Llewelyn. “Giggs had played for United against Leeds but Stennett said he was injured. ‘What’s he got?” I asked. Stennett just muttered: “He’s injured.”

Giggs was to play his first friendly for Wales the following month against Finland in the Millennium Stadium.

The match

Given that this was a rare visit by a team from outside the Middle East, you’d have thought there might have been some sort of buzz locally about the impending clash with Premiership players. There wasn’t.

And as it was a 7,500-mile round trip that involved a huge effort to get there, you’d think most of us would remember the match vividly. But we don’t.

This was possibly the only game in the last 25 years to have featured Premier League stars where most of the fans were actually richer than the players. I took a very bad photo of the car park – and it looks like every local turned up in gas-guzzling tank of a motor.

But we still don’t remember it. Some of the pub team fans, no names, visited several other grounds in a taxi before arriving after the kick-off.

Qatar’s pushing out of the boat for us extended to importing daffodils for the occasion. Beats sheep, I suppose.

Keith ‘Fuzzy’ Jones says: “The turnout was bugger all. Virtually no one there. I got there early, very early. We had pictures in the dugout.”

Barely more than 1,000 were present and the only women were Westerners.

So in the absence of much else to add about a game halfway round the world, let’s focus on the goalscorer:

John Robinson

Ask anyone, John Robinson was bloody fantastic for Wales. Bloody fantastic.

The fans’ favourite for sure. Not dirty either, which was a change for a Welsh midfielder in the 90s given that we fielded Vinnie Jones seven times and nobody lost a scrotum.

It was quite fitting that Robinson scored the only goal of the game with a last millennium tactic. Punt it up, win the header (Speed) and gamble on the angle. Smack it first time, roof of the net. 1-0. Woof woof. I can still picture it.

Having scoured the internet for footage from this match, there appears to be none. A rare case of YouTube doing the world a favour by not taking up needless bandwidth.

That wasn’t it though. Robbo lives fondly on in the memory of those lucky enough to see his whole-hearted effort. For my money, no one before or since has run as much as he has in a Wales shirt.

There was a second memory of the game that stuck. Later on Robinson remains the only player I’ve see who has closed down three opponents trying to get past him, eventually bamboozling them into losing possession.

Did I mention that he was bloody fantastic?

Him apart, most of us barely remember anything. It was a tepid affair. As several fans made their way back across Doha on foot, the match referee from Bahrain, Abdul Aziz Abdul Hamid, offered Tiny from Holyhead and couple of others a lift into town. That’s the bit everybody remembers.

Oh, and we won 1-0.

The aftermath

It’s tempting to read too much into this trip, so let’s do so. Who knows, perhaps world football was never the same after this game.

With the benefit of hindsight it signified the beginning of the end of pub team Wales, which at times seemed to be an extension of Bobby Gould’s swollen ego – his undentable, unquenchable chutzpah would probably have survived a nuclear strike.

We did bump into the players in an Oslo nightclub in 2001 (this was not unusual after the game, and usually the encounters left you wishing you hadn’t met some of them – they seem a lot nicer these days), and while Paul Jones chased every woman who walked through the door, and danced like a dervish, I had a nice chat with Carl Robinson.

Pubs/bars still featured clearly but now, 22 years on, Welsh fans are drinking for the players.

Wales didn’t exactly blossom in the next two years – I always felt we should have qualified for the 2002 World Cup with the squad we had, and opposition that was less than fearsome.

We took a 1-0 lead in six of the ten qualifiers. Winning those games, instead of drawing and only scraping one win – against Armenia – would have booked a trip to South Korea/Japan. But there was always an ‘if only’ in those days. Often, several of them. You got used to it.

But looked at from the outside, you can argue the trip was pivotal.

For Qatar, they started to play against better opposition and the filthy rich state obviously had one hell of a plan which was so brilliantly executed it wowed the world. Only ten years later they won the rights to stage the World Cup.

David Beckham, present for the announcement that Qatar had won, and England lost, the bid for this year’s tournament said he was stunned and upset by what happened. He is now reportedly being paid millions to promote the Gulf state (NEWSFLASH: Astronomers say his missed penalty in the Euro 2004 shootout in Lisbon is now halfway to Andromeda).

Don’t blame Wales for Qatar’s ambitions, although we were among the first to enjoy their hospitality. I got a 20p ticket for nothing.

For Wales, when The Camel had a go, he had a point, even if it was not well made and directed at the wrong person.

Among the FAW entourage was ex-Cardiff City chairman Tony Clemo, who had been jailed for tax evasion in the 90s. The FAW was not corrupt but it was not held in high regard. Around this time it acted decisively and made a good choice in appointing sensible Mark Hughes. It started to listen to fans – not difficult as there weren’t many of us – and made important decisions.

Mark Hughes

a) appeared to stop the rot because, actually, if you go back and look at the line-ups there were a lot of good players in the side, who were underperforming

b) created some sort of buzz, as the FAW decided to stage matches at the newly built Millennium Stadium. More than 70,000 turned up for the friendly against Finland the following month.

c) wasn’t Bobby Gould.

At a stretch, you could argue that this seemingly pointless game (do I get a refund?) might have been one of the most important friendlies both sides ever played.

Mark Hughes got his squad together and, as you can imagine, probably laid down the law to everyone – except The Camel – and sorted the shambles out. I imagine his evident no-nonsense seriousness of intent would have rubbed off on Robert Page. The performances during his spell in charge were proof of that.

Was it good for you too?

The day after the game, at about 5pm, me and Tiny took the boat to Palm Island, an artificial island in the middle of the bay.

As the light faded, the piercing ulullations of a multitude of muezzin in their minarets swarmed across the water. The air was overpoweringly flooded with calls to prayer – it was enchanting, strangely moving, a beautiful cacophony, as if a million bees had decided to synchronise a low-pitched hum.

In this fabricated, plastic environment it was one of the few true glimpses of Qatari life we had experienced, given that most of the time we spent in the bar apart from one rather dull walk down the Corniche to view the Oyster monument.

Qatar gets a lot of stick and deservedly, so no return for me. Qatar got a sniff of European football and liked the taste so much it went out and bought a big chunk of London’s docklands and devised a scheme to stage the World Cup, which frankly I don’t think will be half as much fun as this trip.

One visit there was enough – revelatory, bits of it revolting, bits of it fascinating. All of it the surreal gonzo mad cackle we soon became addicted to – for the next six seasons the away games were an adventure holiday, and this was the first challenge.

The qualifying group draws became a raffle you couldn’t lose. Every name pulled out was a winner and we got to go on holiday there. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine – all wonderful experience.

In Doha, we stuck a rocket up the manager’s backside, the ref gave some of us a lift into town. U-Thant was the cabaret. We didn’t win a Porsche, John Robinson was fantastic, sorry, bloody fantastic.

I just remember chuckling all week. What more can you ask for?

Latest @guardian cartoon#Qatar2022 #QatarWorldCup2022 #FIFAWorldCupQatar2022 #FIFA #WorldCup2022 https://t.co/i4lD2522QX pic.twitter.com/Fw42dtrJRl

— Ben Jennings (@BJennings90) November 13, 2022

Credits

To the memory of Bowser, who I never met again and who died not long ago. Hedd perffaith hedd, bachgen. I am indebted to the following: Gwilym Boore; Rhys Boore , Tiny (Dave Williams), Holyhead; Fuzzy (Keith Jones); Iwan Pryce, Dylan Llewelyn, several others. Especial thanks to the Camel. Pix: Fuzzy, Rhys Boore, Iwan and me.

If you know where I can get a Max Wall mask, please get in touch. Likewise, if you know of an online fund to help the families of migrant workers who have died in Qatar. Cadwch y ffydd.