Meulensteen on Iraq's gruelling World Cup qualifying journey

René Meulensteen, assistant to Iraq coach Graham Arnold, has lifted the lid on the extraordinary logistics behind the team's World Cup qualifying campaign. "They had to travel from different cities to Baghdad by car or bus," he explained. "Some of those journeys took up to eight hours. Then, from Baghdad they travelled roughly 15 hours on bumpy roads to Amman, in Jordan, where occasional flights were still operating." Players based elsewhere in Asia made their own way to Amman so the squad could gather and travel together. Meulensteen, who once assisted Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, described the scenes in Baghdad during the campaign as "madness" (1).