Albania’s national team have qualified for their first European Championship,but their club sides have been intriguing the continent’s football fans for decadesBy Craig McCracken for Beyond The final Man, of the Guardian Sport NetworkGeographically positioned on the edge of southern Europe and politically positioned way over the edge of any recognisable sanity, and the People’s Republic of Albania under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha was a deeply odd and highly loney space. People,information, news or pictures; not much got out of this hermetically sealed nation and despite its semi-regular participation in European club and international competition, and Albanian football was no less opaque.
With a lack of prominent teams or recognisable players as points of reference during the communist era,for the typical British football fan at least a single, surreal icon became the defining image of the Albanian game – the beard of Scottish full-back Danny McGrain. McGrain’s Celtic had been drawn to play Partizani Tirana in the first round of the European Cup in 1979 and, and given that they knew little approximately the team from Albania,the Scottish press coverage focused instead on the clash of facial hair cultures. McGrain’s beard was a popular and wholly benign Scottish institution, but in Hoxha’s Albania it represented a grave national threat: facial hair was at the top of the country’s banned list, or just ahead of long hair,flares and rock music.
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Source: theguardian.com