When the Russians moved in, the footballers moved out.

Now, 23 years after the bloody Soviet invasion, which sparked their mass exodus, a generation of former Afghanistan international footballers are dreaming of helping their country take part in the 2006 World Cup.

A quirk of fate saw several members of Afghanistan's national football team of the late 1970s arrive in this small town in north Westphalia in 1980 after they received political asylum.

Pretty soon they attracted attention from the president of the local third division club.

"He only wanted to take two or three of us, we told him: it's everyone or no one," recalled former midfielder Ali Askar Lali.

And so it came to pass, to paraphrase Rupert Brooke's famous WWI poem, that a little bit of Paderborn will forever be Afghanistan.

Since their arrival in 1980 some 120 Afghan families numbering around 600 people set up home here - a group that included no fewer than 11 members of the 1978-79 Afghan squad and a host of players from the disbanded first division.

Those who took refuge back in 1980 are now in their forties, speak

fluent German, and now work locally in a range of professions: some are computer programmers, others restaurateurs.

Many have married, some with local-born women but most with fellow Afghans who turned up in Paderborn, often with incredible stories of how they had escaped.

The common strand linking many of the exiles is football, a pasttime that has helped keep them going during their enforced exile.

They fiddle around playing amateur stuff, and bicker about their favourite Bundesliga teams, but above all, according to former star Baz Mohammad Norestani, they appreciate the importance of sport in society.

"For a young person who has never known a time of war sport can provide new values," said the former striker for Stor Kabul.

Norestani and his fellow footballers want to use their know-how to help football's rebirth in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

At the top of their project called "football for peace in Afghanistan" is the recreation of clubs and the relaunching of the national team built around young overseas-based Afghan players capable of joining the qualifying race for the 2006 World Cup. They also have their heart set on setting up a national Olympic committee again and using

sport to assist handicapped children and victims of war.

"Each of us wants to spend a few months there over the next two years," said one of the 'Paderborn Afghans' Alef Shojaai.

Helping them is a humanitarian association set up in 1984 and run by a professor of education, Walrut Schuler, at the local university.

She acts as a sort of second mother to the refugees - giving German lessons, helping sort out accommodation and dealing with the habitual mountains of paperwork.

The close ties enjoyed between this European-pocket of Afghanistan should favour the ambitious project and the new interim government put in place since the American-led ousting of the old regime.

The minister for reconstruction, Amid Farhang, a former student in Germany, is a friend of theirs, as is the brother of the temporary administration's leader, Hamid Karzai.

Just to show that they haven't lost their touch and to give the project some publicity Norestani and his colleagues are getting back into training for an upcoming fixture against the ISAF troops in Kabul.