‘I just wanted a chance’: the Mansfield goalkeeping coach who fled Syria

For Fahd Saleh, a conversation at the Job Centre sticks in the memory. A couple of years after arriving in Mansfield as a Syrian refugee hoping to land trials at Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea and continue his football career, he was on the receiving end of a cold and quizzical look when asked which vocation he ideally planned to pursue. “I mentioned that I was a goalkeeper and that I’d like to work for a team,” Saleh says. “The lady, and I can still picture the conversation now, she said to me: ‘You are dreaming.’ Now I would really like to see her to tell her that I’m working for a professional team called Mansfield Town and I’m very proud of where I am.”

Saleh combines his role as an academy goalkeeper coach at Mansfield with working as a PE teacher at Crescent Primary School in the town. After spotting a local advertisement, he is grateful to have been given a chance by the academy manager, Richard Cooper, and the League Two club’s manager, Nigel Clough, who allowed Saleh to work alongside his coaching staff for a couple of months last season.

Mansfield are paying for Saleh to complete his Uefa B licence, a course that has seen him deliver a session in front of the England goalkeeper coach, Martyn Margetson. “I went to St George’s Park,” Saleh says. “‘Wow, here is where the England team train.’ It was a dream come true.”

It is a long way from Homs, where he played for Al-Karamah, winning domestic titles and competing in the Asian Champions League. He left the city after being caught in the crossfire of the Syrian civil war, when his wife, Tahrir, was expecting their first child, Nour.

“One night, armies assembled just behind my home, on the street, to check people’s IDs, and they brought tanks to send bombs