For Bob Bradley and Egypt, a Higher Purpose After Violence Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters The stands behind Egypt Coach Bob Bradley of the United States were empty Friday during the team's World Cup qualifying match against Mozambique. ALEXANDRIA, Egypt - Bob Bradley stood at attention as a full military band played the anthem of his adoptive country. In front of him, Egypt's national soccer team, which he began managing nine months ago, was lined up on the field at the 80,000-capacity Borg el Arab military stadium, the players singing proudly. They were minutes from kicking off their first 2014 World Cup qualifier against Mozambique on Friday. Under normal circumstances the players" voices would be drowned out by the roar of soccer-obsessed Egyptians. But these weren't normal circumstances, not since the revolution. Instead, the players" voices and the music of the military band reverberated eerily in vast, empty stands. Bradley's first competitive match as Egypt's coach was to be played behind closed doors after a series of tragic events befell soccer here after the country's Jan. 25, 2011, revolution, which swept the former president Hosni Mubarak from power. In the security vacuum that followed, violence flared at local games, causing the Egyptian Football Association to suspend the league. But then last February, after the league was restarted, 74 fans from the country's biggest club, Al Ahly, died during violence at a league match against El Masry in Port Said. Most were crushed in an incident many in Egypt believe was connected to the role that Al Ahly's fan group, the Ahlawy Ultras, played in the revolution. The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has blamed simple thuggery. Many of Bradley's players had been there that night. Egypt's legendary midfielder Mohamed Aboutrika held one fan as he died in his arms. The league was canceled. No soccer has been played in Egypt since with fans in attendance. Three days before the Mozambique match, Bradley sat in the lobby of his team's hotel near the Borg el Arab stadium wearing his red Egyptian soccer jersey. He had just put his team through one of its final practices before the match. "This is all about trying to qualify for the World Cup; that's the dream, that's the mission, that's what's pushing us all every day," Bradley said. There's a responsibility to build a team that represents the country in the right way and makes people proud. That, of course, would have been the mission statement when he was hired last September in a febrile post-Mubarak, post-revolution atmosphere. His first match was a narrow loss to Brazil in the Qatari capital, Doha, in November. It was to be his last for many months. When Bradley arrived at the Cairo International Stadium on Feb. 1 to see a league match between two local clubs to assess players ahead of World Cup qualification, news filtered through that dozens of fans had died at the stadium in Port Said. Bradley watched it unfold on TV as many of the players he had called up to the national team ran for their lives. "I think it's important to understand the tragedy in Port Said impacted on the whole country, and it especially impacted on the football community," he said. Bradley was so moved by the images of thousands of people waiting in Cairo for their sons and brothers and fathers to return from Port Said that he decided, along with his wife, to join a march the next day at Sphinx Square to remember the dead. "It has been incredibly difficult to find the right way to think about Port Said," Bradley said. Playing for the national team is a bigger responsibility than ever now. The memory of the tragedy is being carried with some of them in a strong, positive way. In other cases those terrible memories are still nightmares. The idea of getting to a World Cup now burns inside all of them. With the league canceled, for many of his players, the national team was the only soccer they have played since Port Said. Slowly but surely Egypt started to build momentum as the World Cup qualifiers approached, setting up training camps and playing any opponent they could find in some pretty inhospitable environments.