The business of losing heavily regularly, though, can take its toll. How does a team recover from a mauling such as the American Samoans suffered, ridiculed across the world to this day? What is it about the human spirit that forces a player to pick himself up and try again? Thirty One Nil tries to understand exactly that. It tells the story of qualification through the eyes of the players, coaches, fans and administrators who will probably never see or be part of the World Cup finals. It tells the story of hope in the face of realism. The journey begins in the West Bank. From there to Jordan, Tajikistan, Haiti, Rwanda, Australia, Samoa, Lebanon and beyond. It tells a story about international football’s survival, about defeat amidst the mirages of victory.
And yet ... with every tournament, every cup competition anywhere in the world, there is always one team that defies the odds, the one example held aloft as proof that, no matter how far away qualification can seem, there is always a chance of being the next Trinidad and Tobago of 2006, the Jamaica of 1998, United Arab Emirates or Cameroon of 1990, Iraq of 1986, North Korea of 1966, or Zaire and Haiti of 1974. As the scramble for qualification nears its conclusion, with all the political intrigues along the way, there is one team that inevitably emerges to prove that miracles might happen. At the end, the 203 national teams that began with dreams of qualifying for the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil will have been brutally chopped down to thirty-two. A long, bumpy journey, it began in Trinidad with that game between Montserrat and Belize.
**
The first match went by in a flash. Jay’Lee remembers the heat, the rain and the nerves. ‘In the first ten minutes I did an overhead kick and hit one of the defenders. And the referee said to me: “Yellow card.” And I was in bits. I thought I’d be sent off if I made another rash challenge,’ he said. But it was Belize who took the lead. Yet despite the disparity in FIFA rankings, Montserrat equalised. ‘I had a header that went wide of the post, I remember. And then the ball was whipped in, I hit the ball, volley, back of the net. The ball bounced down and I celebrated my goal as I always do, pointing to the sky.’ The gesture honoured the cousin whose death prompted Jay’Lee to rethink his life. The game was tied 1-1 at half-time and Montserrat had a famous scalp in their sights. ‘We had about fifteen chances in the first half of the first game,’ Jay’Lee lamented. ‘We should have buried them.’ Instead it was Belize that came out stronger, stung by being held by their supposed inferiors, scoring four times before Jay’Lee scored a second goal. The match finished 5-2. Montserrat’s three-goal deficit looked insurmountable until a scandal erupted within the Football Federation of Belize. FIFA suspended the Belize federation over ‘political interference’ in the running of the game. ‘We thought we were going to get into the next round and the next stage, the group stage,’ coach Kenny Dyer said ruefully. ‘We actually arrived at the hotel in Belize [for the return match] and got the call saying that the game was cancelled. We stayed overnight and went home.’
As time ticked down to FIFA’s preliminary World Cup draw at the end of July 2011 in Rio to determine the qualification groups in all of FIFA’s confederations, Montserrat prayed that Belize wouldn’t be readmitted. But, with days to go before the draw, Belize was reinstated and the match was hosted at the second neutral venue of the tie. In Honduras, Montserrat again equalised, again with Jay’Lee Hodgson scoring. But Belize ran out 3-1 winners, the tie finishing 8-3 on aggregate. ‘We should have been winning 5-0 in the first twenty minutes,’ Dyer said, the pain of that defeat still evident as he recalled a match that had taken place over two years earlier. ‘It was very nice to hear the Belize officials saying: “We had our backsides whooped. We should have been out of the World Cup.”’
After a lifetime of non-league obscurity Jay’Lee had scored all three of Montserrat’s goals in World Cup qualification and had become one of his adopted homeland’s all time top scorers. ‘After I played in the World Cup qualifiers against Belize I went home with all my mementos, my flags and the shirt and all that and my mum said to me: “Don’t you remember in 1994 when you said to me and your auntie in the kitchen that you will play in the World Cup?” And I’ve done it. It is a dream come true.’
Kenny Dyer won’t be masterminding a future Montserratian assault on the World Cup finals. In May 2013 he left the post. He had a new challenge to face, as technical director of Portmore United FC, the reigning champions of Jamaica’s Red Stripe Premier League. But it was the national team game that still reigned supreme, even if Dyer regretted the loss of its attraction to a certain kind of modern player.
‘Club football has the power and TV has the power. Players’ finances have taken over,’ he said. ‘Whereas before you played for England it meant a hell of a lot. It meant a lot more ten to fifteen years ago. It is club over country at the moment and it should be the other way around.’
But not in Montserrat. I had one final question for Dyer. What, after all the beatings, motivates a coach, a player, a kitman, a physio, to try and try again in the face of such long odds? He thought for a moment but the answer came easily to him. ‘It is inside every player, although it is hard to describe. At the game with Belize when you stood in the hotel room and corridor, you could feel the buzz, the anticipation. There was a light on all our faces. We believed we could do this. And we almost did. We almost did.’ A month after we spoke, Portmore United FC fired Dyer.
One day, teams like Montserrat won’t exist, not in their current haphazard form. Professionalism will continue to spread uniformity. It will be a good thing that those with the talent can be paid and be treated with the respect they deserve. But without the Montserrats or the San Marinos or the American Samoas, what will be left? Without the underdog, and with it the faintest of hopes of the upset that every sports fan craves, football would be a dead-eyed and black-hearted place. World Cup qualification is unique in that respect. The Olympics has its odd shocks, it has its Eric the Eel moments, the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea who found himself at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney despite having never swum in an Olympic-size pool before. Eric the Eel is still written about today. Few remember who won the gold medal. But these, in a way, are manufactured, qualifiers handed a spot at the finals in good faith. The World Cup, on the other hand, is as brutal as it is meritocratic. In the draw for the 2014 finals, the 2010 finalists Holland were drawn against Andorra, a principality with a population of 85,000. Andorra would no doubt be crushed but, unlike in many other sports, the chance remains that an upset could still take place, that a rock from David’s sling could still break Goliath’s temple.
Belize made it through to the first group stage of CONCACAF World Cup qualification, along with the Bahamas (who later pulled out because their national stadium, a gift from the Chinese government, wasn’t ready in time), the Dominican Republic, St Lucia and the US Virgin Islands, who won the battle of the Virgins and with it their first ever World Cup match. The first round of CONCACAF qualification had come to a close. Next it was Asia’s turn, where my journey would begin in Jordan, Tajikistan and the West Bank. Palestine had been drawn against Afghanistan, a potentially politically explosive affair.
After all the hope, Montserrat were out. But the experience of World Cup qualification hadn’t left Kenny Dyer bitter. Even after the 7-1 defeats, the ignominy of being ranked last in the world, the disagreements, tantrums, lost luggage, inept bureaucracy, corrupt politics, ingratitude, tiny crowds and, finally, for all that hard work, unemployment, international football was still what he dreamed of. ‘The World Cup is the pinnacle,’ he said, as if he was pining for an unrequited love. ‘I will never play in the group stages of the World Cup. You can win the Champions League, but playing in that World Cup ... Just saying you played in the World Cup in the greatest sport and the greatest tournament in the world ... for me playing it is the pinnacle.’
**
Clifton All Whites FC finished training and Jay’Lee Hodgson was called into the dressing room for a final team talk before the first game of the Central Midlands Footbal
l league (South Division) season. His exploits in Trinidad and Honduras hadn’t led to the flood of professional offers that he had hoped for, just a few trials further up the food chain that hadn’t amounted to anything. Bad luck and injuries, Jay’Lee explained, had hampered his chances. Instead he had laced up his boots for whoever would have him, whoever made him feel at home. ‘Every time I play football it is the same,’ he said. ‘I am on a pitch with my mates. Whether I am kicking it in the park or playing Belize, it is the same. For ninety minutes I just let my troubles go.’
Just over forty spectators saw Montserrat international striker Jay’Lee Hodgson score on his debut for Clifton All Whites FC. He had already set up his team’s first goal, before volleying in the second at the near post. During the second half he was moved to centre-back, where he made sure Hucknall Town’s strikers could not get their team back into the game. The match finished Clifton All Whites 2 Hucknall Town FC 1. Jay’Lee Hodgson limped off the pitch, the result of a clearance during the frenzied last ten minutes of the match as Hucknall Town sought an equaliser. ‘It’s always good to score on your debut, innit, job done,’ he said of his performance. But Montserrat was never far away. He was already thinking of the next World Cup, in Russia in 2018. He’d be thirty-five by the time the qualifiers came around again. ‘I’d love to play in the World Cup again, I’m waiting for that call,’ he said, limping back to the clubhouse canteen. ‘I hope I can stay fit and injury-free. I’m thirty-three now but there are players who play until they are forty. As long as you look after your body your body looks after you. I am just waiting for that call, waiting for that email.’
1
PALESTINE, AFGHANISTAN
Tursunzode, Tajikistan. June 2011
The white-tiled dressing room is silent and hot. A single air-conditioning unit is turned up high, fighting a losing battle against the 40 degree temperature as the players from the Palestinian national football team sit with their backs against the wall wearing green shirts and shorts. Around the neck of each man is a black and white keffiyeh, the desert scarf made famous by Yasser Arafat. Some choose to close their eyes, raise their hands and pray. Others simply stare at the only thing moving in the room. Coach Moussa Bezez, a French Algerian who once represented France at youth level and has been in charge of the team for two years, paces the room, careful to tread softly so as not to make too much noise. He has nothing more to say to his players after delivering his final, impassioned team talk. He opens his mouth as if to add a piece of wisdom, but he knows that his players need this moment. The silence is finally broken by the match commissioner. It is game time. The team, the squad and the coaches meet Moussa in the middle of the room. They link arms in a circle and begin to pray. ‘Fil-es-tine!’ shouts one of the players. The rest roar back in agreement.
Palestine’s long road to the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil begins here, in an obscure, decrepit stadium in western Tajikistan against Afghanistan. Technically it is a home match for Afghanistan. The tie was due to be played in Kabul, but the security situation was so bad that it was moved to Tursunzode, a dying aluminium-smelting city a few miles from the Uzbek border. To prove just how dangerous the situation was, two suicide bombings in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan a few days before meant that no one knew whether the Afghans would even show up. But they have. The Afghan players stand in line in the tunnel of the Metellurg Stadium. Both sets of players eye each other suspiciously. It’s the first time either team has been able to see who they will be playing. They are almost complete unknowns to each other.
‘Come on, guys, let’s do this!’ shouts Omar Jarun in an accent from the Deep South as he claps his hands. Jarun is a six-foot-five monster of a centre-back, with a blond mohawk, who hails from Peachtree City, near Atlanta, Georgia. He has never been to the West Bank and he speaks no Arabic, but his grandfather comes from Tulkarem, a small town north of Jerusalem. He was spotted playing football in the US second division after the Palestinian Football Association launched a global hunt for players among the Palestinian diaspora. Behind him stands a microcosm of the Palestinian experience. First is left-back Roberto Bishara. He is from Chile and plays for Palestino, a first division club that was built by Palestinian immigrants who fled their homes and arrived in South America following the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948. He too speaks no Arabic. Or much English.
Midfielder Husain Abu Salah is an Israeli Arab, a descendant of one of the Palestinians who didn’t flee into exile. They stayed in Israel. He speaks Hebrew and holds an Israeli passport. He even spent several years playing for Bnei Sakhnin, an Arab club that plays in Israel’s first division, but he decided to quit and play in the West Bank so that he could better represent Palestine. The goalkeeper, Mohammed Shbair, is from Gaza. He is a dead ringer for Iker Casillas, Real Madrid’s Spanish international goalkeeper. He hasn’t been home for two years. Such are Israel’s movement restrictions that he has to seek special permission to leave the West Bank where his club is. Once his papers weren’t in order after a friendly in Sudan and he was refused permission to return home; he spent three months in exile in Jordan.
That the Palestinians have a national team at all is a miracle; they are a national team without a nation state. FIFA recognised Palestine in 1998, one of only a handful of international organisations to do so. But then the second intifada intervened and the national team has been in limbo ever since: unable to play games at home, divided between Gaza and the West Bank and prevented by both the Israelis and the Egyptians from getting their players out of the territories to fulfil its away fixtures.
But this World Cup is different. For the past three years football in Palestine has undergone something of a revolution and has been used as a political vehicle by the Palestinian Authority to promote a recognised Palestinian entity abroad. The second match against Afghanistan will take place in the Faisal al-Husseini Stadium outside Ramallah, Palestine’s first ever World Cup match on home soil. The national team is the mirage of a nation made flesh. In front of them stand the unknowns of Afghanistan, a country equally as blighted by war and tragedy.
‘How do you say “come back” in Arabic?’ Jarun asks his fellow centre-back hopefully, just as FIFA’s official theme tune – a sugary, pompous dirge that sounds as if it has been gleaned from the Super Mario Brothers soundtrack – is played too loudly on the crackly Soviet-era PA system. The players walk out of the narrow tunnel and into the blinding sunlight, the pressure released like a caged bird thrown into the cloudless blue sky.
**
One week earlier
Outside the clean but functional Gardinia Hotel in Amman, the capital of Jordan, coach Moussa is sweating as he throws kitbags into the belly of the Palestinian team coach. He curses under his breath as his squad of players slowly emerge into the already hot summer’s morning.
‘I said 7 a.m.,’ he fires at the few players who have made it outside on time with a sarcastic shrug. It’s 7.30. The team doctor, chain-smoking Marlboro Red Tops, grudgingly abandons a fourth cigarette and helps him pack the coach instead. Omar Jarun is sitting on the steps of the hotel. He’s been there for forty-five minutes reading his copy of the Jordan Times, the country’s only English-language broadsheet. ‘No, there’s nothing,’ he replies when I ask him what is going on in the world. ‘Nothing that’s good anyway.’ He puts down the paper and goes to help.
International football, and especially World Cup football, might look like a glamorous parade of glory and five-star luxury, but not here. The Palestinians are in Jordan for a training camp in Amman before flying to the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, an eighteen-hour flight via Dubai, for the first leg of their World Cup qualifier against Afghanistan. It is the first round of Asian Football Confederation qualification, designed for the lowest ranked teams in Asia, a chance to weed out the truly appalling and unprepared from those that have a chance. Sixteen teams have been drawn for the first round, ranging from the obscure (Chinese Taipei – a political sop of a name designed to allo
w Taiwan to play despite Chinese objections – Macau, Timor-Leste and Mongolia) to the underdeveloped (Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Laos) to the huge and hugely underachieving (Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar and Malaysia). Incredibly, between them their national football teams are drawn from countries that represent three-quarters of a billion people, almost the same population as Europe.
For any of these teams the task of qualifying would be hard enough at the best of times. It would prove logistically challenging even with top international players and a football association with an unlimited budget. But this was Palestine, a team that had neither money, top international footballers nor a country to call their own. The problems in getting a team together were legion. For a start, each of the Palestinians based in the West Bank had to leave overground into Jordan, the only exit to the rest of the world open to most Palestinians. In the past, several players had been detained by the Israelis on their way to play a match. When qualifying for the 2006 World Cup was under way, five players were detained trying to leave Gaza and the West Bank for a match against Uzbekistan in neutral Qatar. They lost 3-0.
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