A-League veteran Jack Hingert<\/a> to players lacing their boots up in the Victorian second division (VPL) like Barath Suresh.<\/p>\n“There’s this unity and camaraderie because \u2026 everyone’s humble and everyone just [wants] the best for the country,” Dekker said.<\/p>\n
Last-minute call-up<\/p>\n
Although lining up on opposite sides of the pitch in the NPL, there is one thing that both Dekker and Jamal Ali share in their careers \u2014 the chaos of planning for an international window.<\/p>\n
The late scheduling, the plane tickets being emailed the day before the flight, and the struggle of organising work while living out your childhood dreams.<\/p>\n
Born in Sudan to Eritrean parents, Ali was introduced to the Sudanese national team by fellow NPL Victorian player Kenjok Athiu.<\/p>\n
After two years of conversations with coaches and officials, Ali finally got to make his debut in early 2025.<\/p>\n
“They pretty much just emailed me the ticket the day before I was meant to fly, and I didn’t know anything about it,” Ali said.<\/p>\n
With a flight scheduled for Thursday night, Ali faced a problem \u2014 his NPL side, Heidelberg United, was set to play rivals Preston Lions on Friday night.<\/p>\n
![\"jamal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/d3c68f75e13e282e8a45d8d6f5e2a1ec\")
<\/p>\n
Jamal Ali playing against the Newcastle Jets in the 2025 Australia Cup final. (Getty Images: Robert Cianflone)<\/p>\n
After some frantic phone calls, Ali managed to change his flight so he could play and score for Heidelberg, then hastily made it to Saudi Arabia for the Sudanese team camp.<\/p>\n
Ali, who works as a centre manager at a YMCA, also had to get the all clear from work with only a day’s notice. And it came with a condition: he just needed to be available for emails while he was away.<\/p>\n
He says the whirlwind experience still “blows his mind”.<\/p>\n
“I’m in the hotel room, we’ve got training in the mornings, in the evenings, and gym, and in between I was just smashing out some emails,” he said.<\/p>\n
![\"soccer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/3a5dbb069061caa353d3ccfcbdf71da1\")
<\/p>\n
Jamal Ali playing for the Sudan national team against Oman.\u00a0 (Supplied: Jamal Ali)<\/p>\n
It has been a year to remember for Ali, making a national team debut, winning the NPL Victoria with Heidelberg, and a fairytale Australia Cup run.<\/p>\n
But he still wants to achieve another major milestone \u2014 making the squad for the upcoming African Cup of Nations in Morocco. It is the first time Sudan has qualified for the tournament since 2021.<\/p>\n
Emotional reconnection<\/p>\n
There are now many players scattered across Australia’s lower leagues who represent national teams around the world.<\/p>\n
One of the first to do so for the South Sudan national team, founded in 2011, was Peter Deng, who is currently unattached to a club.<\/p>\n
Although his younger brother, Thomas Deng, is a Socceroo, for much of the siblings’ adolescence, they would have described themselves as stateless, with no passport or a country that claimed them.<\/p>\n
![\"team](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0d1c60335ed56c24ad3c5a57ae21c587\")
<\/p>\n
Peter Deng (top right) made his international debut two years before brother Thomas debuted for the Socceroos.\u00a0 (Supplied: Peter Deng\u00a0)<\/p>\n
Born to South Sudanese parents in Kenya and moving to Australia eventually as a refugee, Deng did not possess legal citizenship anywhere until he eventually received his Australian citizenship in 2003.<\/p>\n
Having never spent time in South Sudan before joining the national team, Deng’s understanding of the country was limited to the stories and memories his mum had passed down.<\/p>\n
“To get the call from my national team, my country of origin was very, very, very emotional actually,” he said.<\/p>\n
It also gave him the opportunity to travel to the country for the first time in 2016.<\/p>\n
Having lost his father as a teenager, he was able to visit the places his dad had spent time throughout his youth.<\/p>\n
“It was an opportunity to reconnect to my roots, and to do it through something that I love was even better,” Deng said.<\/p>\n
“In three years [playing for the national team], I got to experience what life was like for my family, my community, my ancestors.”<\/p>\n
![\"Peter](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/0c1fb27ea9cd0853e1480cf2d267b9b3\")
<\/p>\n
Playing in Sudan was the first time Peter Deng had been to the country\u00a0 (Supplied: Peter Deng\u00a0)<\/p>\n
With a diaspora scattered across the world, there was a unique opportunity to learn and understand the varying cultures at the team camps.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had all these different experiences, whether it’s those that were living maybe in Khartoum, those living mainly in Dubai and rural areas, and then those living out in the West, and I think that sense of culture and community was still intact,” he said.<\/p>\n
It may not have been the exact dream Dekker had during “curry-curry night,” but it has become a reality for so many scattered across Australia’s lower leagues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The closest Wade Dekker ever expected to get to playing international football for Sri Lanka was at his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,2331,596,173570,78250,11472,173567,173569,13198,42150,50636,85,1210,161107,173568],"class_list":["post-304171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-culture","tag-football","tag-jamal-ali","tag-multiculturalism","tag-npl","tag-npl-victoria","tag-peter-deng","tag-soccer","tag-socceroos","tag-south-sudan","tag-sports","tag-sri-lanka","tag-sudan","tag-wade-dekker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}