Ammo Baba

Emmanuel Baba Dawud (27 November 1934 – 27 May 2009), better known as Ammo Baba (Arabic: عمو بابا, Syriac: ܥܡܘ ܒܒܐ), was an Iraqi football player and coach of the Iraq national football team.

He scored the first international goal for Iraq in 1957 against Morocco at the 2nd Pan Arab Games in Beirut and later returned to the team as the coach in 1978.

Ammo Baba was born in Baghdad, Iraq, of Assyrian ethnicity. He emerged in the Middle Eastern football scene at the age of 16 at a 1951 Pan Arab School Championship in Cairo playing for the Iraq against the home nation Egypt. He had been discovered by Iraqi schoolboys' coach Ismail Mohammed while playing for the Liwa Al-Dulaim school province team. Mohammed gave him the nickname 'Ammo Baba' and advised him to move to Baghdad to play for one of Iraq's top teams. Ammo who is still revered by generations who never saw him play, was an instinctive out and out goalscorer, known for his bicycle kicks or backward double-kicks as they are known in Iraq, heading ability, and the power of his shooting. He had an opportunist's eye for goal but also displayed magnificent technique and virtuoso skill of a great footballer.

Ammo was born in Baghdad on the British controlled military camp RAF Hinaidi but moved with his family to live on the Civil Cantonment on the large RAF base in Habbaniya in 1937, where he first learnt to play the game of football. After playing for his school team, he moved to RAF Employees' (Assyrian) Club in 1951 replacing legendary striker and fellow Assyrian Aram Karam, where he played with other famous Assyrian footballers such as Hormis Goriel, Emmanuel "Ammo Simsim" Samson and Youra Eshaya. In 1954 he signed for Baghdad-based Al-Haras Al-Malaki where he was a huge success, scoring bundles of goals, season after season. The goalscorer wore the legendary number 8, though that is not the number a forward normally wears, it did not stop him from scoring. The prolific marksman was once the captain of a short-lived Arab national team during the mid-Sixties, in a Nasser-inspired experiment in Arab unity which failed due to the fact that, which Ammo Baba puts it 'no one wanted to play against us'. It had been the initiative of Arab radio station Sawt Al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs) in Cairo, and two of the best players from each Arab country were called up to take part in the team, from Iraq Ammo Baba, and Qais Hamed were selected. The team organised in Egypt did not play in any international competitions, managing only to play a few local teams in Cairo and Alexandria. Ammo Baba had been picked alongside Qais Hamed, and the team was able to beat Al-Ismaili, Al-Ittihad Alexandria, draw with Zamalek and lose to Tersana, with Ammo scoring the first goal for the Arab team, and hit another two goals against Al-Ismaili.

After brilliant scoring record for both Iraq and Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya, he was spotted by English 2nd Division side Notts County managed by former Iraqi military coach Frank Hill and was offered a contract to play for them, but when the call from Meadow Lane came, he could not leave the country, due to a sudden coup led by the Iraqi General Abdul-Karim Qasim on 14 July 1958. A year earlier another former coach of his, William Cook offered him a chance to play for Crewe Alexandra, then in the English Third Division and there were also offers from Chelsea and Celtic but Ammo decided to stay in Iraq.

By the age of 20, becoming one of Iraq's most prolific goalscorers at both local and international level, with a near perfect 100% goal-scoring ratio from 1955 to 1960. As a player, he could adapt to any position, and played in defence, midfield and attack in his playing career.

A national championship winning coach at the age of 23 at Al-Athori, made even more impressive when you think it was done with an Assyrian only club policy, and in 1967, Ammo was coaching two teams in the Iraqi league.

He went on to play and coach Al-Athori (Assyrian Sports Club) to the Iraqi Cup Championship in 1960 beating his former employers Al-Jawiya 3-0 in the final, before returning to Al-Jawiya in 1962 after Al-Athori were relegated from the Iraqi first division. He later played for Maslahat Naqil Al-Rukab and Al-Kuliya Al-Askariya before calling it a day in 1970.