Thankfully for the team they won the match and were handed cash prizes in the locker rooms as a ‘thank you’. From that day on they kept on winning and life was good. Alex didn’t have to pay for anything, everyone knew who he was. People didn’t charge him for clothes in shops, meals in restaurants, he got everything he needed handed to him.

On February 17th 2011 Alex was up on the roof of his apartment in central Benghazi where he like to relax when things started to take a pretty serious nose dive. He saw a group of protesters across the street, then a military convoy, then shooting and bodies and screaming. He hit the deck and stayed down until the shooting stopped then legged it inside, terrified. He called his coach Sharif who had already escaped back to Egypt to help his family in the uprising there. He told Alex to stay put and someone will come for him.

The internet was down, the phone wouldn’t connect, he sat nervously waiting for news. He peeked out of the window and saw young guys that he used to play football with carrying AK47s and machetes. Things had changed. The picture above was the view from his roof.

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