Just eighteen fans have turned up for the game. The tiny crowd can be explained by the fact that it’s a midweek, 3 p.m. kick-off. Equally as influential is an ongoing rugby sevens tournament in Australia which features a Samoa side that can actually compete with the world’s best. Once, in 2007, Samoa even won the title, considered such a great achievement on the island that the image of the team lifting that trophy is commemorated on the Samoan 10-tala note. This is, after all, a rugby country in a footballing world.
Under the stadium and along the tunnel, the dressing rooms on either side are full to bursting. The humidity and sweat in the Tonga locker room is so thick it seems that a mist has descended from the hills. But there is silence as Tonga’s short, thin Australian coach scribbles out motivational slogans in Tongan on to a whiteboard he has brought with him. Like the American Samoans, the Tongans have turned to a foreign coach to revive their fortunes. Unlike the American Samoans, however, they have opted for youth over experience. ‘These are sort of the beliefs of the team,’ says Chris Williams, at twenty-five the youngest coach in charge of a full FIFA national team. ‘The word “ikuna” means victory.’ He turns to his players. ‘It means victory, yeah, boys?!’ The team shyly mumble back in agreement. ‘“Faka’apa’apa”, is respect. “Mamahi’ifanou” means pride, proud to be a Tongan and “lelei’taha” do your best. They chose that one.’
It had been a swift trajectory for both Williams and his team. He had played semi-pro in Australia but took his coaching badges at fifteen, spending four months shadowing the coaching staff at Scottish club Motherwell and a short spell learning the ropes at FC Copenhagen in Denmark. ‘I was an Aussie Aid development officer in Tonga,’ he explains of how he ended up on the Pacific island in the first place. ‘And then it all snowballed from there really.’ For the previous eight months he had built the team from scratch, learning Tongan as he went along. The players were all amateurs, the majority working as fishermen. Those who weren’t working as fishermen were unemployed fishermen. ‘There hasn’t been any football development for years,’ he says. ‘When we started I got forty guys together from the league, well, those that could actually kick the ball, and taught them how to kick, head, pass, long pass. They’ve come a long way but I don’t think it will hit them until they hear the national anthem.’
In the opposite room Thomas Rongen is giving a final motivational speech before the team come together and pray in a circle. Even Rongen the atheist is praying with them. ‘I still don’t know when the whistle blows how this team will react,’ he had said before the game. ‘When that whistle blows will they choke again? Will they literally give goals away?’ Perhaps all the hard work over the three months, the 4.30 a.m. starts, the psychological healing, the ice baths and the prayers would all be in vain.
The two teams stand squeezed, shoulder to shoulder, in the tunnel before FIFA’s theme tune is played and the twenty-two walk out into the blinding light. Jaiyah Saelua is starting her first ever match, at centre-back, and walks out to join her team-mates for the national anthems. When the referee blows his whistle, history has already been made: the first time a transgender player has ever started a World Cup match. Thomas Rongen prowls the touchline as if he is kicking every ball, barely able to sit in the temporary blue cloth dugout that has been erected for the occasion. He screams directions at each player, pulling his hand back and forth, beckoning and pushing them into position as if they were attached to an invisible rope.
Nicky Salapu is having the game of his life, acrobatically throwing himself at the feet of Tonga’s strikers when they burst into the penalty area and gathering the ball. He moves to the corner of the six-yard box, counting to ten before kicking the ball out of his hands. Rongen counts along, too, a pre-arranged tactic to slow down the game. As the first half comes to a conclusion, Jaiyah Saelua finds herself in possession in the centre circle. She strikes the perfect through ball for Ramin ‘The Machine’ Ott – a US soldier who has taken all three weeks of his annual leave at the same time to be here – who hits the ball without much conviction from thirty-five yards out. It bounces in front of the diving Tongan goalkeeper, hits him in the face and flies into his own net. For the first time in their history American Samoa has taken the lead. All the players run screaming towards Rongen like moths returning to a flame, piling bodies up in front of him. The half-time whistle blows. Against Australia in 2001 they were already 16-0 down by this stage.
American Samoa confidently pass the ball around in the second half. Salapu is in impenetrable form, confidently gathering the ball, spraying it wide or short or long when he needs to, but always gathering the ball, walking to the edge of the six-yard box and counting ten, as instructed. The minutes tick by but no one wants to believe what is happening. The American Samoan bench grows silent, the Tongans’, too. They, after all, are close to losing to the worst team in the world. Only the voice of Thomas Rongen booms out like an artillery piece. Even on the YouTube video of the game, it is Rongen’s voice you can hear above everything else bellowing instructions. And then, with quarter of an hour to go, victory becomes a real possibility. Shalom Luani is clear, one on one with the Tonga goalkeeper. The ball is bouncing around after a high ball over the top of the defence. Luani reaches it a split second before the goalkeeper sickeningly collides with him. He screams, but the ball has bounced over the line as Luani lies writhing on the floor. He’ll be OK. American Samoa are now 2-0 up. Tonga frantically push forward and reply with a few minutes left, a well-placed header that Salapu can do nothing about. There are goalmouth scrambles, fingertip saves. In the final, desperate minutes there’s no shape, no tactics, just twenty men swarming into each other in a sort of malignant scrum. Tonga have a final chance to equalise when midfielder Timote Maamaaloa breaks through and is one on one with Salapu. Salapu saves it but the ball breaks loose and is bouncing towards the goal. Jaiyah Saelua is there, at the last, to blast the ball high into the air and away.
The final whistle blows. It takes a moment for Thomas Rongen to realise he has achieved the improbable. After thirty failed attempts, American Samoa records its first ever victory. Goalkeeper Nicky Salapu has waited a long, cold ten years for this moment, a moment he feared might never come. He is on his knees in the penalty box, screaming into his gloves at a pitch somewhere between grief and ecstasy. He only stops to punch himself in the forehead, as if to check that this moment is really happening.
To his right the manually operated scoreboard shows a score he thought he would never see: American Samoa 2 Tonga 1. The man in charge of hanging the numbered wooden slats had, in recent years, become accustomed to – indeed, he had been expected to – count out goals in their dozens. But not today. The 31-0 match had changed Salapu’s life for ever. It had haunted his sleep and blackened his waking thoughts. But not any more. ‘I feel like a champ right now!’ he shouts tearfully. In front of Salapu his team-mates, unsure about the dynamics and the etiquette of victory, run in circles around Rongen before they start to form order out of the chaos, like worker bees protecting a newly constructed hive. A victory war dance is performed for the first time, the Samoan haka, the siva tau.
The team Samoa, may you succeed in your mission
There is no other team anywhere
Here I come completely prepared
My strength is at its peak
Make way and move aside
Because the team is unique
The team Samoa
The team Samoa reigns from Samoa
The team!
Salapu is having a private moment, on his own, to contemplate a life without the scars he has carried with him for ten long years. ‘Finally,’ he says, wiping the tears from his face with his glove. ‘I’m going to put the past behind me. I can live my life again.’
Jaiyah, too, is crying. She is given the ‘man of the match’ award without a hint of irony. Rongen grabs Jaiyah and then Nicky to congratulate them. He is at the centre of the celebrations, urging his team to believe they can win th
e whole tournament. Before the match Rongen had modest goals. ‘If it’s just to win a game to get Satan out of Nicky’s head,’ he had said, ‘then that’s enough for me.’ But now the game had changed. Now they believed.
**
Nicky Salapu is sitting in the gloomy dining room that doubles up as Thomas Rongen’s tactics classroom at the team’s motel. He sits differently now. Before the Tonga game he appeared separate from the squad, a loner deep in thought, surly even. Now he is animated and chatty, back straight, a permanent smile stuck on his face. It’s the day after American Samoa’s first victory and Salapu is still coming to terms with what has happened. ‘It’s amazing. Sometimes you have to pray for a miracle,’ he says excitedly. He seems unsure how to express everything that is in his mind, as if he’d awoken from a deep sleep and was trying to understand the new world around him. ‘For all the things that happened, the 31-0 against Australia ... in Seattle most of the players there say “are you from American Samoa, you gave up thirty-one goals”. They make jokes of me. Now, we won!’
It has been a hard decade since that game in Coffs Harbour. The match had made headlines worldwide. It became a ‘... and finally’ footnote, an amusing antidote to a news bulletin weighed down by depressing stories. ‘I made twenty saves,’ Salapu adds, now looking at the bright side of the 31-0 defeat. Which is true. Earlier coach Rongen had spoken of how, if Salapu hadn’t been in goal that day, the score would have been 51-0. In fact, Salapu’s performance in the face of Australia’s uncompromising win-at-all-costs mentality had procured for him a trial at the Newcastle Jets, but it didn’t amount to anything. ‘That was a huge mistake,’ Salapu recalls of playing the match. With two entire teams ineligible due to an administrative error, it was thought that even a team of fifteen-year-olds would be better than nothing. ‘We shouldn’t have taken a team,’ he admits. ‘I’ve been carrying it now for nearly eleven years. It was emotionally ... dramatic. Terrible. It was the terrible thing that happened to me. This was the worst thing ever. But things happen for a reason. Maybe that’s why, to challenge us.’ Some in football, though, shared Salapu’s and the then American Samoa coach’s disdain as to why Australia would want to keep scoring so many goals. When Craig Moore and Tony Vidmar, two of the Australians who had played in that 31-0 game, returned to their Scottish league club Glasgow Rangers, their Dutch coach Dick Advocaat was livid. When I interviewed him in 2005 he had proudly told me that he had dropped both for their next game against Dundee due to their perceived unsportsmanlike conduct.
After the game, Salapu threw himself into football in Seattle, playing six nights a week, coaching two elementary school teams while also teaching his son the basics of the game. He had also devised an additional coping mechanism. He would fire up a two-player FIFA match on his Xbox 360, choose Samoa versus Australia and disconnect the second controller so that he could fill his boots. ‘I’d score and go up and up until 50-0!’ he says, laughing now. In the real world, however, there was little redemption to be found on the pitch with American Samoa. The next qualification campaign for the 2006 World Cup was marginally better, but only just. He conceded thirty-four goals in four matches. The dream of appearing in a World Cup finals was never discarded, even in the face of such crushing, overwhelming evidence. American Samoa kept playing and kept getting beaten badly. But now they had won. Things were different. ‘I feel like I’ve been let out of prison. I want my son to grow up and don’t want kids chasing him around saying your dad lost 31-0 ... but if we win this tournament, we will get to Brazil no doubt! Even if we qualify for Brazil, and I don’t make it there, I would die as a happy person.’
American Samoa is now in the new world. They had never won before, that was true, but they had never even approached a game without the almost certain belief in their own destruction. Next up was the Cook Islands, a nation of just 24,000 people who, nevertheless, were the highest ranked team at the tournament and had several Kiwi players with contracts in the New Zealand league. They were coached by a former All Whites international, Shane Rufer. His brother, Wynton, had been voted the Oceania player of the century after an incredible career in Germany with Werder Bremen where he won six Bundesliga titles and even finished joint top scorer in the 1993–4 UEFA Champions League. I’d only discovered Rufer had taken over as coach of the Cook Islands after sitting next to a polite and chatty Wynton on my flight to Samoa via Auckland. He kept a stack of postcards in his bag, with a picture of himself performing a scissor kick on the front and his name on the back. He signed one, handed it to me and told me how excited his brother was about the opportunity, especially as he had eight New Zealand-based players to choose from. The rest of the qualification group would be whipping boys. He was worried that another 31-0 might be on the cards. As we said goodbye it seemed clear to both of us that the Cook Islands would steamroller every team that was put in front of them. But it didn’t quite work out that way. Later the same evening after American Samoa beat Tonga, the hosts Samoa beat the Cook Islands 3-2. Rufer was already under pressure. The president of the Cook Islands federation had spoken darkly of dressing-room bust-ups and Rufer would be fired a few minutes before the American Samoa game, pitchside, by the federation. His career in international management lasted just ninety competitive minutes.
Rongen, on the other hand, was on cloud nine. ‘It feels great, it really does. I delved into the unknown so it’s personally satisfying,’ he says back at the motel. Before the Tonga game he had complained about the lack of press interest in the game in Samoa or elsewhere. But now his phone is ringing non-stop. Just like a decade ago, American Samoa was international news again, a very different ‘ ... and finally’ segment to bookend a broadcast full of bad news stories. ‘To get that first win and release Nicky’s demons, his scars, his emotional scars, for them to get that illusive win, for the first transgender player to play a FIFA event,’ he says, apologising as he breaks off to take a call from Samoan television. ‘At the end of the day, there’s the purity, the love and joy of the game. A bunch of amateurs who sacrificed a huge amount, losing money from their jobs, getting up at 4.30, sleeping in a room with thirty guys on the floor, no mattresses. That was pretty incredible.’ There was never going to be a better time to achieve American Samoa’s first ever winning streak.
**
Thomas Rongen is furious. His team are scattered around him on the sidelines of the pitch at the J. S. Blatter Stadium. They look anywhere but at him. Rongen looks like he’s dressed for the beach, in blue polo shirt, shorts and cream baseball cap. But his mouth is collapsing into a vicious scowl. He paces in front of the team, twitching for an outlet. American Samoa has just drawn with the Cook Islands 1-1. It’s another first for them, their first ever draw. But it could have been so much more. The first half had been all American Samoa. They were a team not reborn exactly – that would suggest a return to former glories, of which there had been none – but, rather, hewn afresh. They were unrecognisable from the sacrificial meat that had been thrown in front of their opposition over the past decade. The Cook Islands were hit by wave after wave of attacks. Chance after chance was missed. There were stepovers. Stepovers! Finally, the pressure was too much. Jaiyah Saelua ballooned a high ball forward. The defender missed it and Shalom Luani nipped in to poke American Samoa ahead 1-0. It was the least they deserved. For a second consecutive half Nicky Salapu had kept a clean sheet. He prowled his penalty box, imperious now, chin jutting into the air with the same arrogance that possesses the best. But in the second half they were the masters of their own downfall. The Cook Islands pumped a hopeful free-kick high into the penalty area. With no one around him, Tala Luvu placed a magnificent header into Salapu’s bottom left-hand corner. The problem was that Luvu had headed past his own goalkeeper. American Samoa broke through time and time again seeking the victory that would almost certainly assure them of a place in the next round. But the Cook Islands’ New Zealand-born goalkeeper Tony Jamieson was equal to everything that was thrown at him. American Samoa
had snatched parity from the jaws of victory. Rongen’s face is thunderous, waiting for someone to ignite his fury. And that someone is goalkeeper Nicky Salapu.
‘Can we do the haka now, coach?’ Salapu asks meekly as the team gather their stuff in silence.
Rongen checks back, barely believing what he has just heard.
‘No, Nicky, we only have a haka if we win,’ he replies. Salapu tries to scurry away unnoticed.
‘Are you happy with that?!’ Rongen shouts after him.
Salapu looks back blankly, puzzled, unsure of the right thing to say. This is a man, after all, who has picked the ball out of his net more than 150 times for his country. He had dreamed of one day drawing a match, but it had always seemed too fanciful, too remote. Now they had won and drawn two games in a row. It felt good.
‘ARE YOU HAPPY WITH THAT?!’ Rongen repeats, this time booming.
‘Er ...’ Salapu stammers, ‘yeah. Yes.’ He shrugs. He is only being honest.
‘And you’re happy with that?’ Rongen repeats in disbelief.
‘Yes!’ Salapu confirms, more confidently now.
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