Muhammad Al Owais stood between the three sticks, while the ticket to the “Gulf 27” final was hanging between the foot of the Qatari goalkeeper, Khoukhi Bu Alam, and the glove of the Saudi goalkeeper.
Al Owais blocked the kick, but the joy was not complete. The referee decided to redo it because the goalkeeper advanced over the goal line. The Qatari player returned to the penalty spot, and Al Owais returned to the line, as if the scene was starting again. He shot it again... and Al Owais blocked it again in a shot that sums up much of the story of the Saudi goalkeeper in this tournament. Opportunity comes again, and Al Owais clings to it again.
After 120 minutes, during which he did not concede a goal against Qatar, Al Owais continued his presence in the penalty shootout, and contributed with his saves to Saudi Arabia’s 3-2 victory, before Mukhtar Ali scored the last kick, announcing the arrival of “Al-Akhdar” to the Gulf Cup final.
But what is striking is that the hero of the semi-final night did not start the tournament, as the Saudi team, “Gulf 27,” and Nawaf Al-Aqidi entered between the three sticks against Kuwait. Al Owais remained waiting on the bench until the 78th minute, when Al Aqidi suffered an injury that prevented him from completing the match.
Then Al Owais entered for a few minutes, which at the time seemed like a forced participation to complete the match, before medical examinations later confirmed the end of Al Aqidi’s participation in the tournament.
Suddenly, the entire responsibility shifted to Al-Owais. Against Oman, he started for the first time, and kept a clean sheet in the Saudi victory 3-0, then he did the same thing against Iraq in the 2-0 victory, so that “Al-Akhdar” left the group stage with a full score, and without conceding any goal.
After two relatively quiet matches, Qatar came to put the Saudi goalkeeper to the toughest test. Semi-final match, 120 minutes, then penalty kicks; This is the moment when the goalkeeper transforms from one of 11 players into the most present figure on the field.
There, Al Owais recalled many years of experience in the national team’s jersey, as the 34-year-old goalkeeper knows well what it means to stand against Saudi Arabia’s goal in major matches. He was the “Green” goalkeeper in the 2022 Qatar World Cup, and his name was specifically linked to the night of the historic victory over Argentina 2-1, when he played one of his most famous international matches and won the Best Player award in the match.
Four years later, he returned to start guarding Saudi Arabia's goal in the 2026 World Cup, and he excelled remarkably against Uruguay after stopping nine shots, in a match that ended in a 1-1 draw.
However, the Gulf Cup was a completely different story. This time, Al-Owais did not enter the tournament as the first choice, and his participation was not the result of a technical decision before its start. Rather, Al-Aqidi’s injury opened the door to Kuwait.
What seemed at first to be an urgent circumstance turned, as the tournament progressed, into one of the most important details of the Saudi team’s journey towards the final.
From the moment he entered against Kuwait, Al Owais did not concede any goals against Oman and Iraq, then he held out for 120 minutes against Qatar, before he became the most prominent player when the match reached penalty kicks.
Perhaps the story of Al Owais contains another paradox. The goalkeeper, who does not enjoy regular participation with Al Hilal in light of the presence of Moroccan Yassine Bono, is still able to appear in the biggest moments when wearing the national team shirt.
From Argentina in Doha, to Uruguay in the 2026 World Cup, all the way to Qatar in Jeddah, the tournaments and occasions changed, but Al Owais maintained a special relationship with matches that put the goalkeeper under pressure.
As for “Gulf 27”, his story began from a place he did not expect to leave so quickly: the bench. His colleague's injury gave him the opportunity, his clean sheet stabilized him, and Qatar's kicks made him one of the champions of the tournament. Between the 78th minute against Kuwait, and the final kick against Qatar, the story of Mohammed Al Owais changed completely. He entered the tournament as a substitute... and reached the final as champion of one of its most decisive nights.
In the world of football, a decisive kick may change the path of a player, and this is precisely what happened with Mukhtar Ali, who made his mark in the 27th Gulf Cup tournament, after he waited throughout the group stage without getting a single minute of play, before appearing in the semi-final against Qatar, and the scene ended with him in front of the ball that carried the Saudi team’s ticket to the final match.
Mukhtar was not among the main list that began the “Green” preparations for the tournament. Greek coach Georgios Donis summoned him on September 20, after Musab Al-Jawir was excluded for disciplinary reasons, so the Al-Ittihad player joined the camp a few days before the start of the competitions.
Despite the late call-up, Mukhtar continued to wait for his chance, and the match against Kuwait passed, which Saudi Arabia won 1-0, then Oman, which ended with a 3-0 Saudi victory, and finally Iraq, which “Al-Akhdar” won 2-0, without the midfielder participating for any minute.
Saudi Arabia finished the group stage with three victories, while Mukhtar’s tally in the tournament remained at “zero minutes of participation,” but the semi-finals wrote a completely different scenario for him. Against Qatar, Mukhtar started the match again on the bench, in a confrontation that extended after a goalless draw in regular time into extra time, before reaching the most stressful moment in knockout matches, which is “penalty kicks.” There, Mukhtar moved from a hidden player in the group stage to one of the heroes of the semi-final night, after he stepped forward to take the last Saudi kick and put the ball into the net, giving “Al-Akhdar” the ticket to qualify for the “Gulf 27” final.
The irony is that the 28-year-old was not accustomed to having his name associated with goals with the national team. Before the tournament, he had 14 international matches with the senior Saudi national team without scoring any goals, and he participated in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, the 2023 Asian Cup, and the 2025 Gold Cup, in addition to friendly matches. But Mukhtar's story itself has a different path than many Saudi players. He began his football training in England at the Chelsea Academy, then moved to the Dutch club Vitesse, where he won the Dutch Cup in 2017, before returning to Saudi Arabia via Al-Nassr in 2019. After stops with Al-Taei, Al-Fateh, and Al-Ittifaq, he moved to Al-Ittihad in the summer of 2026, to begin a new chapter of his career in Jeddah.
It was also from Jeddah that one of his most special international moments came; Mukhtar, who arrived at the national team camp as a substitute before the tournament, and did not play a single minute during the first three matches, found himself a few days later facing the responsibility of executing an unerring kick. Between “zero minutes” in the group stage and the last kick in the semi-finals, Mukhtar Ali’s position in the story “Gulf 27” changed.
