How late bloomer Mehdi Khalil became Lebanon’s ‘Mountain’ between the posts

Mehdi Khalil was a late bloomer. At the age of 22, he was working in a clothes shop and playing football just for fun; a full-time career in the sport seemed a world away.

Just a year later he was making his national team debut for Lebanon, and for the past decade he has been first choice between the posts for the Cedars.

It was a dramatic upturn in fortunes for Khalil, now of Jordan’s Al-Faisaly.

He was given a helping hand by ex-Lebanon national team captain Roda Antar. Like Khalil, Antar was raised among the large Lebanese diaspora in Sierra Leone and it was on a visit back to Africa that he spotted the goalkeeper’s potential.

“He asked me to do trials for the national team and at that time I wasn’t playing football professionally. I was working in a shop,” Khalil told Arab News. “But he always believed in me. I still remember him telling the coach, ‘Mehdi can be the national team goalkeeper for the next 10 years.’ It turns out he was right.”

Khalil, nicknamed “Jabal,” meaning “Mountain” because of his stature, has since built an impressive career in Lebanon. He won two Lebanese Premier Leagues and an FA Cup with Safa before adding four more league titles and two FA Cups with Al-Ahed.

His crowning glory with Ahed, however, was their 2019 AFC Cup triumph. Keeping nine clean sheets, with five successive shutouts in the knockout stages, including the final, Khalil not only won the club’s first continental trophy, but was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

The goalkeeper’s impenetrability was inspired by a desire to prove his doubters wrong after an error he made in the 2019 Asian Cup against North Korea. Lebanon needed to win the game by four goals to progress to the knockout stage, but Khalil let a