ASK AROUND and the consensus is that Libya’s best player is the midfielder Tariq al-Taib. He has twice finished in the top 10 of the voting for African Player of the Year, had successful stints in Tunisia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and captained the national side the last time they reached the finals of the Cup of Nations, in 2006. When Libya walk out at the Estadio de Bata this evening to face Equatorial Guinea in the opening game of the 28th Cup of Nations, though, Taib will not be there.

He is 34 and last year signed for the Kuwaiti side Al Naser, but Taib is not part of the Cup of Nations squad. “Too old,” says Libya’s Brazilian coach, Marcos Paqueta. It is a convenient excuse. Last March, after Libya had gone top of their qualifying group with a 3-0 victory over the Comoros in a game played in Mali because of the conflict at home, Taib came out as a Muammar Gadafy loyalist, describing the rebels as “rats” and “dogs”. Three months later, the squad began to turn.

Walid al-Kahatroushi, who had scored the opening goal in that first game against the Comoros, heard that a friend of his had lost an arm in the fighting shortly before the return fixture. He decided he could no longer pull on a shirt bearing the flag of Gadafy’s Libya, walked out on the squad – the first anybody knew of his decision being when they saw him waving from beyond the gates of their camp – and, after visiting his friend in hospital in Tripoli, joined the rebels at Jebel Nafusa near the Tunisian border.

At first they would not let him fight but, as the situation became more desperate, he was forced to the front line. He was lucky; he survived to see Gadafy toppled, after which the rebels told him he could serve his country best by playing for the national team and qualifying them for the Cup of Nations for only the third time.

Although his son Saadi loved football, running the federation and the Tripoli club Al-Ahly, and having a brief and deeply inglorious spell as a player at Perugia where he was voted the worst ever Serie A signing, Gadafy himself hated the game.

He shut down the local league in 1979, supposedly because, seeing the names of players written on walls, he became jealous of their popularity and afraid of the potential of revolt from the terraces.

In 2000, he was given a clear insight into the anarchic passions football can provoke. There had long been complaints that the league was rigged to ensure Saadi’s Al-Ahly would win. So Al-Ahly of Benghazi, Libya’s second city and for a long time the centre of dissent, dressed a donkey in a Tripoli shirt bearing Saadi’s squad number and paraded it before kick-off.

When the refereeing again favoured Al-Ahly Tripoli, Al-Ahly Benghazi left the stadium at half-time. Bringing dogs with police as back-up, Saadi forced them to return to complete the game, which finished 3-0 to the Tripoli side. Worse was to follow, as Gadafy snr had the headquarters of the Benghazi club razed and banned them for six years.

Where others saw football’s potential for propaganda successes, Gadafy was so hostile to the game that he missed his great opportunity. Libya hosted the Cup of Nations in 1982 and reached the final, only to lose on penalties to Ghana. Gadafy, though, had long since washed his hands of the tournament, his speech at the opening ceremony consisting of one terse sentence: “All you stupid spectators, have your stupid game.”

Kahatroushi aside, two other players, the midfielder Ahmed al-Saghir and the goalkeeper Guma Mousa, went to fight; neither is in the squad for the finals. Saghir was shot in the shoulder, while Mousa survived the conflict only to suffer a serious knee injury in a warm-up game against a Tunisian club side shortly before Libya’s decisive final qualifier away to Zambia.

A draw in the Comoros had been followed by an emotional 1-0 win over Mozambique in a game played behind closed doors in Cairo.

That was the first game in which Libya wore their new colours – white with a black and red trim, and the flag of the new Libya. The victory meant they needed a win away to the group leaders, Zambia, in their final game to qualify for sure.

With the new anthem yet to be ratified, the Zambians were forced to play the old Gadafy anthem before kick-off. Sensibly, they played it so quietly nobody could hear it. There were no favours during the match, though: twice Zambia hit the post, and Mousa’s replacement, the 39-year-old Samir Abod, made three superb saves. Libya held out, though, drawing 0-0, a result that was enough to take them through as one of the best two runners-up.

“It’s an amazing time,” Paqueta says. “They don’t play only for the national team, they play for the people who have endured difficult lives. They put everything in their hearts on the field. We want to get out of the group stage, that’s the goal.”

Today in Bata is not just a match, but a celebration of the new Libya.