Thirty-One Nil Read online

  Pentru Balerina mea

  ‘The Philistine with his shield bearer in front of him, kept coming closer to David. He looked David over and saw that he was little more than a boy, glowing with health and handsome, and he despised him. He said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. “Come here,” he said, “and I’ll give your flesh to the birds and the wild animals!”’

  1 Samuel 17:41–44

  ‘It was me against the swimming pool.’

  Eric ‘The Eel’ Moussambani

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1 Palestine, Afghanistan

  2 Haiti, US Virgin Islands, Curaçao

  3 Rwanda, Eritrea

  4 American Samoa, Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga

  5 Lebanon, United Arab Emirates

  6 Egypt, Mozambique

  7 Antigua and Barbuda, United States

  8 Switzerland, Albania, Kosovo

  9 Croatia, Serbia

  10 Egypt, Lebanon, Rwanda and Eritrea Reprised

  11 Brazil, Nigeria, Spain, Tahiti

  12 Romania, Hungary

  13 Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia

  14 Iceland, Norway

  15 Jordan, Uruguay

  16 The Last Thirty-two

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  Nottingham, United Kingdom. August 2013

  The Norman Archer Memorial Ground on the edge of the Clifton council estate, itself on the outskirts of Nottingham, glowed green in light and dark stripes, mown in perfect parallel lines as the first game of the football season drew close.

  The pitch was guarded along one side by a corrugated-iron stand capable of hosting no more than fifty, perhaps sixty, paying spectators. A ticket cost £3. In front of it stood a wooden dugout and technical areas. The perimeter was dotted with just enough home-made wooden advertising hoardings from local businesses to keep the ground afloat financially: Michael’s Fresh Bake, J. D. Plumbing & Heating and NG 11 Taxis had all dug deep into their pockets.

  A hot August sun had greeted this Saturday. Not a soul had yet sullied the pitch, nor the dugout, nor the corrugated-iron stand. Metal crush barriers optimistically surrounded the pitch, even though it was unlikely there would be any need for them. Fresh netting had been pulled down tightly from each crossbar. Temporary corner flags had been pushed into the ground, occasionally fluttering in the light breeze.

  In the nearby clubhouse an excitement recognised by anyone who has waited impatiently for the return of English football’s metronomic presence – August to May, August to May – filled the air; a mixture of humidity, Deep Heat and hope. It was one hour before the home team, Clifton All Whites FC, kicked off their season against Hucknall Town FC in the Central Midlands Football league (South Division). This is the lowest tier in English semi-professional football, the transitional point at which the forever amateur meets a cursory, peppercorn wage. For the tens of thousands of players who dream of the Premier League, of England, of the Champions League – or simply dream of being paid enough to survive doing the thing they love most in life – this is either the first rung on a long and almost impossible ladder or its precarious last, with only oblivion below.

  Jay’Lee Hodgson had arrived at the Norman Archer Memorial Ground early, as hopeful as at the start of any season during his resurrected career. Logic dictated that, at thirty-three, even if in good shape and with youthful lines shaved into his right eyebrow, the direction of the Nottingham-born striker’s footballing trajectory was as clear as it was inexorable. But that logic was somewhat misplaced. Jay’Lee skipped up the steps of the squat, brick-built clubhouse and embraced his new coach, one of more than a dozen he had similarly embraced in six years. ‘I’m buzzing,’ he announced excitedly before he entered to join his team-mates, tossing the butt of his roll-up on to the floor. ‘I can smoke five or six of these before a game but it doesn’t affect me. My friend’s still call me the black George Best!’ He exhaled a long ‘huh, huh, huh’ machine-gun laugh before disappearing into the building.

  This was to be Jay’Lee’s first competitive match for Clifton All Whites FC, a team that was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this season. The club had a strong local reputation for discovering top young players. It acted as a sort of unofficial feeder club for some of the bigger local teams, like European Cup winners Nottingham Forest and Notts County. The latter, founded in 1862, is the oldest professional football club in the world. Former England international Viv Anderson started here, as did the likes of Jermaine Jenas and Darren Huckerby, who both went on to play in the English Premier League.

  Clifton All Whites FC may be a team that nurtures the earliest of embryonic international talent, but this season was the first time a bona fide, current international footballer had turned out for the team. That international team may be one of the lowest ranked in international football – indeed, it is perhaps one of the worst teams in the history of the international game – but that team, and Jay’Lee himself, was now a small but important footnote in the history of world football. In June 2011, two years and two months before the start of this new season, even before the afterglow of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa had been replaced by the twinkling distant hope of the next finals, Jay’Lee Hodgson played in the very first qualification match for the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil, for the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat against Belize. Not only that, he had scored twice, too.

  Not many people had paid much attention to that match, played as it was between two teams ranked 206th (Montserrat, joint last) and 154th (Belize) according to FIFA’s international rankings at the time. In fact, only 150 spectators had turned up to watch the game in the Ato Boldon Stadium in Trinidad and Tobago. It was to be a two-game play-off, home and away. Four other fixtures would be played at the same time in total, involving the ten lowest ranked teams in CONCACAF, one of FIFA’s six confederations that represented teams from North America, Central America and the Caribbean islands.

  Most of the teams came from small countries with tiny populations, made up of amateur players who spent their days as mechanics, policemen, doctors or preachers. Many of those players had never tasted victory in their entire international careers. Rather, they had become accustomed to losing matches by scores in double figures. Yet campaign after campaign, beating after beating, they continued to believe and continued to play. Alongside Montserrat and Belize the likes of Anguilla, Aruba, the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands still dreamed a remote and implausible dream. There was even room for a grudge match of sorts: the British Virgin Islands had been drawn against the US Virgin Islands. Neither had ever won a World Cup qualification match before, meaning something finally had to give. Even given the crazy odds, there was still the faintest of hopes.

  Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory with a population of just 6,000, couldn’t host its home match against Belize. The southern half of the island – including its capital, Plymouth – had been destroyed after the island’s Soufrière Hills volcano erupted in 1995. Two-thirds of the population left. Today, the southern half remains an exclusion zone. Without a stadium that met FIFA’s standards elsewhere on the island – the national coach Kenny Dyer, a forty-nine-year-old Englishman with Montserratian roots, lamented in the press before the game that the pitch in Montserrat was one of the best he had ever seen but that ‘the dressing rooms weren’t ready, they hadn’t been painted’ – the match was moved to Trinidad instead. With little money and very few international fixtures between World Cup qualification campaigns, a team had to be raised almost from scratch.

  Jay’Lee hadn’t been born in Montserrat. Most of the team hadn’t. Instead the Montserrat Football Associat
ion decided to tap into an underexploited resource: the second- and third-generation diaspora that still existed in the home of the empire that had colonised it. But Jay’Lee hadn’t been scouted in the conventional manner. Instead his call-up to international football had come in the most meritocratic of ways. ‘I just went on a trial in Hackney and I got an email four weeks later from Kenny Dyer that I was in the squad and then Bob’s your uncle ...’ Jay’Lee recalled, now sitting next to the pitch as his team-mates trained in front of us, as if becoming an international footballer was as easy as applying to appear on a game show.

  In a way, it was. Coach Kenny Dyer decided that an open trial on Hackney Marshes, a large area of common land home to dozens of football pitches in London’s East End that filled up every weekend with thousands of amateur footballers, would procure a team that could qualify for the World Cup finals ahead of the likes of Mexico, the US and Jamaica.

  ‘We went over to London for a local Caribbean tournament and I know a lot of pro players in the UK from non-league right up to Premier [League] and there was so many players down at the park,’ Dyer said, speaking from Jamaica on Skype, the camera on his iPad zooming in a little too closely to his dreadlocked head. He looked two decades younger than his forty-nine years.

  ‘There must have been seventy players there and I got them together. I stood up and I told them: “I am the head coach of the Montserrat national team and I am looking for players and I need to know which one of yous has parents, grandparents, great grandparents from Montserrat.”’ He was rewarded with silence. ‘They looked at each other as if to say: “So who the hell is Montserrat!”’ he laughed. ‘But then one hand raised ... and then another ... and then another. We managed to assemble the best squad of players that Montserrat ever had.’

  Dyer had become an accidental national team coach. A former Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur trainee, he’d moved from club to club in England’s non-league before heading to Cyprus to play professional football there. When his brother went to Montserrat, the island of their father’s birth, on holiday, he started giving Kenny’s number out, boasting about his professional contract in Cyprus. Eventually he was called into the squad. ‘They came to England first,’ he said of his first meeting with the team. ‘The coach introduced himself and I went training with the boys. I knew immediately what kind of strength we had and it wasn’t very good.’

  With the end of his career nigh – Dyer made his last appearance for the Montserrat team at forty-six – he eventually moved into coaching and was employed as the national team coach for the start of the 2010 World Cup qualification campaign, largely because he was the only person with any professional experience. Montserrat’s campaigns tended to be short: one, maybe two brutal beatings at best. Their previous World Cup campaign for the 2006 finals ended in a 20-0 aggregate loss over two matches against Bermuda.

  ‘Would you take the job if you were asked?’ Dyer asked. ‘These opportunities don’t come up. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime. It’s in my blood. It was a chance for me to try and see what I could do to develop football on the island.’ But the scale of what he had agreed to soon dawned on him. ‘At every football club there’s a chain of command: a coach, a kitman, a physio, groundsman, right? Well, here, they never had any of it. I was rubbing my eyes saying what the hell is going on.’ What upset Dyer most, however, was the dress code. ‘Even when we were travelling for games, you usually all wear the same tracksuits so you look like a national team. No. They were wearing all sorts of different clothing. I said to them: “You are representing yourself, your mother, father, grandmother.” They turned up in flip-flops and shorts. I had to put my foot down on that.’

  Dyer almost missed his first game in charge, too, a World Cup qualifier versus Surinam in Trinidad. A disagreement with a member of the Montserrat FA meant they had flown to the game without a coach until the president intervened. ‘Three days prior to the trip I got an email from the FA president begging me to take the trip. I said I’d do it. Two days before the match I went.’ It wasn’t a happy experience. ‘They were a shambles,’ he said. ‘The players who travelled, I wouldn’t have picked them for a Rymans Premier League game. They weren’t up to international standard at all. We got beat 7-0.’ It took a few moments for him to realise he got the score wrong. ‘Sorry. 7-1. We weren’t ready.’

  In the aftermath of that beating Dyer decided to give the team at least a veneer of respectability and use his contacts from years of moving around English non-league football to find the Montserratians whose families – thanks to hurricanes, volcanoes or poverty – had been cast far and wide from their home island. Eventually that path led to Hackney Marshes, an open trial and Jay’Lee. ‘He was a breath of fresh air,’ remembers Dyer. ‘He reminded me a little of Jermain Defoe. He was just goals, goals, goals.’

  Jay’Lee recalls the makeshift park trial slightly differently. ‘There was about twenty-five people there and there was a few players you could see who, er …’ he pauses diplomatically when asked about the standard of some of the players at the trial. ‘Let’s just say you could see who was quality there and who was not. I just did my thing and hoped for the best, innit. The standard, I thought, was really good. You had some players who had played in Australia, for Leyton Orient, for Northampton, for [Nottingham] Forest [three English professional teams] and St Mirren [in Scotland]. I thought to myself I’ve never played at a higher level before. This is my chance.’

  That Jay’Lee’s chance came so late in his career, at a time most footballers are considering what to do once the game has finished with them, was rooted in indiscipline, bad luck and, finally, a tragedy that changed his life for ever. As a teenager he had a trial for non-league side Tamworth Town. The coach asked him back for a second chance but he never turned up. ‘My mate who was driving said he wouldn’t go,’ he says. ‘So I sacked it on the head and didn’t play football again until I was twenty-six.’

  He always had talent but growing up on one of the biggest and most deprived council estates in Western Europe provided its own problems, and distractions. ‘I was doing all sorts,’ he recalled with a smile. ‘Fucking, women and drink, all sorts. It’s what teenagers do.’ Many of his friends had ended up on drugs or in prison, but it would take a bereavement to force Jay’Lee to change his ways. ‘My cousin passed away and one of the last things he said to me before he died was “you should have been a footballer”. It broke my heart,’ he said. ‘So I knuckled down and started playing football again.’ He started getting fit, although he could no longer do without his ubiquitous roll-ups. That would just have to be tolerated. He started from the bottom, playing for anyone who’d take him in Nottingham’s amateur Sunday leagues. Everywhere he went he scored goals. ‘I played again, played on Saturdays and Sundays, moved to Long Eaton, played for Loughborough, and got a job as a personal trainer.’ He was as far as he could possibly be from international football, let alone the World Cup. But there was something inside telling him he was meant for something else, something bigger. ‘As a kid I remember watching the 1994 World Cup with my mum and my auntie,’ he said when asked about his earliest World Cup recollections. ‘I said to them: “One day I’ll play in the World Cup. One day.”’ And then came the trial on Hackney Marshes after someone from the Montserrat FA discovered that Jay’Lee qualified thanks to his grandparents, who were born on the island. He was on a plane to Trinidad and the first qualifier of the 2014 World Cup finals, the first step on the road to Brazil. ‘I’d just lost my job, too, and two weeks later I was an international footballer,’ he laughed. ‘It’s funny how things work out, innit?’

  **

  International football means something. We live in an age where the economic evolution of the club game has made money omnipotent in football. International football, however, doesn’t reward with money. It doesn’t revere the most lucrative contracts. It doesn’t tolerate transfers, except in the most limited or bizarre of circumstances. International football is luck, the throw of a dice.
In theory, who you play for is largely determined before you are born. A national football team becomes the nation personified, rubbing up alongside enemies and friends in equal measure. International football, and its zenith the World Cup finals, can start wars, spark détente, ridicule and undermine despots or save an unpopular regime from oblivion.

  The immense power of international football first dawned on me at the age of seven. I had just watched Argentina’s Diego Armando Maradona punch the ball past Peter Shilton at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. My dad screamed at the screen. I burst into tears. But the goal stood. Many valuable lessons had been learned that day, not least the fallibility of referees. Later I would learn of the importance of that goal. How Maradona had believed that God had personally intervened. How it was God’s hand that smote the English. How it was retribution for the Falklands War waged between Argentina and the United Kingdom four years earlier over a tiny, apparently unimportant group of islands in the South Atlantic that had none the less claimed the lives of hundreds of Argentine sailors, mostly young conscripts the same age as Maradona.

  International football meant something. It meant unity, identity and on this occasion it meant revenge. And there could be no bigger stage, other than perhaps a second more successful war, for revenge than the finals of the World Cup. But the World Cup finals are merely the tip of an iceberg. Beneath it a long battle is played out worldwide, sometimes for years in advance.

  Ever since the second World Cup in Italy in 1934 (the first, in 1930, was by invitation only) the qualification process has almost perfectly reflected the world around it. But the qualification for the World Cup doesn’t begin in London or Cairo or Rio. It starts in places like the Ato Boldon Stadium in Trinidad. It begins with players like Jay’Lee Hodgson and coaches like Kenny Dyer. It begins with the underdogs and the dreamers. Thirty One Nil is an attempt to tell the story of qualification for the 2014 World Cup finals, and, with it, tell something of the story of the world during this period. But not just through the eyes of the teams and the players who made it; rather, it is an attempt to tell the story of qualification through the eyes of those who have almost no hope of making it. The underdogs. The amateurs who begin each qualification campaign with real hope, before their eventual humiliation. The title of the book comes from the record score in a World Cup qualification match when, on 11 April 2001, Australia beat American Samoa 31-0. Striker Archie Thompson bagged thirteen goals that evening, another world record. The match became a worldwide story. Why? Because we are all fascinated by the outsider. The world of professional sport can only be viewed longingly from the stands by most people. But the outsider? He is one of us, moulded in our image, recognisable to the touch.