The former Socceroo helped get a talented footballer out of jail in Thailand and more than a dozen young women out of a Taliban-led Afghanistan. Now he’s taken on another knotty challenge: reigniting interest in an Australian republic.
“Who is Craig Foster?” she wondered. “And why is he helping us?” It was August 2021. Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, had just fallen to the Taliban, and 20-year-old Moeen was hiding in a room in her parents’ house with 14 other young women, most of them fellow university students. Taliban fighters were roaming the neighbourhood, knocking on doors and taking people away. Moeen and her terrified friends had decided they would rather kill themselves than be captured.
Craig Foster with Marwa Moeen, one of the Afghan refugees he helped escape the Taliban and reach Australia. “Craig’s got that ability to pull people together. To get them to lift for the common good, and a common goal.”Among those who escaped were the members of the Afghan national women’s football team, who are now affiliated with Melbourne Victory and play in Victoria’s state leagues. It seems to Zali Steggall, herself an Olympic medallist in alpine skiing, that Foster’s capacity for staying level-headed and resourceful under pressure is a legacy of his long experience competing in top-level sport.
At Addison Road, Foster does everything from soliciting donations and recruiting volunteers to making up food hampers. Sam Mostyn, chair of the federal government’s Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, has spent many an hour packing boxes of groceries beside him. These days Foster gets around on an electric moped but Mostyn fondly remembers him arriving for duty on the Ducati he used to own.
“There were people with more talent than me,” he says, “but I just would never give up.” From 1996 to 2000, he played 29 matches for the national team. On retirement, he transitioned smoothly to commentating with SBS. “He was a natural on TV,” says retired football writer Ray Gatt. “Great insights. Terrific football brain.”
Foster’s advocacy for Bahraini-Australian soccer player Hakeem al-Araibi helped free him from a Thai jail., a lot of his friends were keen surfers. On weekends, while he played soccer, they headed for the coast and rode waves. On the rare occasions he went with them, he envied them their skill. “I would realise, I’m just not very good at this,” he says. “And that kind of annoyed me. It was the one sport that I really wasn’t able to master.”A couple of years ago, he set about fixing that.
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