Football used to be strong in Eritrea, Ermias says. Of course, he tells me about Ethiopia’s successful 1962 Africa Cup of Nations team, how nine of the starting eleven were Eritrean. Every Eritrean I have spoken to has told me variations of the same story. But then a government decree changed everything. ‘In 2005 the government decided that all players should go for army service,’ Ermias says. Conscription; the never-ending cycle of war and forced labour in Eritrea that was almost impossible to escape from. ‘After that football got weak and no one had interest to play soccer. And some players were getting opportunities to play overseas but they weren’t allowed. It’s a bit hard. But all Eritreans have to do it. That is why they decided all the players have to, too.’
Unlike any other profession, football still provided some escape from never-ending servitude. Eritrea travelled to the 2009 CECAFA Cup in Kenya with little hope of making it past the group stages. They surpassed expectations. A 0-0 draw against Zimbabwe was followed by a narrow 2-1 loss to Rwanda. But a 3-1 victory over Somalia meant that Eritrea finished second in the group, qualifying for the quarter-finals ahead of Zimbabwe on goals scored. They were drawn against Tanzania although it was clear by now that this would be their last game for Eritrea. ‘I think everyone had the idea independently,’ Ermias says when I ask when he decided that he was going to defect. ‘From that idea everyone was waiting. We collected together and went to the game.’
With the players’ minds on other things, Eritrea lost the quarter-final against Tanzania 4-0. None of the players remembers anything of that game. What they do remember is what happened next. Twelve players from the team left the hotel and arrived on the doorstep of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and claimed political asylum. They were taken, processed and then locked together in a camp for six months. ‘I don’t know what to say about it, man,’ he says, still suspicious of talking about his escape. None of the players wants to say too much, be too critical of the old regime. They all still have family in Eritrea. The four other players he lives with don’t want to talk. They don’t even want to give me their names. ‘They kept us in a compound. It was just us. We were like prisoners staying all together,’ he says of his time at the UN. ‘Then, after six months, we came to Australia. It was hard, man. It was harsh. They don’t give you anything.’
Ermias didn’t choose Australia; it chose him. He didn’t care where he went. Whoever wanted him first, that was where he and his team-mates would head. ‘We just wanted to get out, man, because life was hard. As soon as we heard we were going out it was the best day of our lives. Just because we were starting over. All over again. It was a pretty good feeling. All we knew of Australia was the Sydney Olympic Games and the harbour. That was all we knew.’ The Australian government took good care of them. Even the notoriously grumpy Australian immigration officers were cordial. They were given accommodation and money to live on. But what they craved most was to play football again. And to work. The group was split between teams in the FFSA Super League, the highest level of state soccer in South Australia. They began playing semi-pro. Ermias was picked up by Western Strikers who found him his job working in the switchboard factory. Two players, Samuel Gebrehiwet and Ambes Sium, were signed by A-League side Gold Coast United. Ermias had a trial with Adelaide United FC, but couldn’t pursue it. They needed a full-time commitment but with no guarantee of a contract. He had to choose his job, with its regular income, or the chance of maybe getting a contract after a trial. He chose the certainty of the job. After all, good jobs were almost impossible to come by in Eritrea. ‘We didn’t have anything when we left. All we had was our kit,’ said twenty-one-year-old Nevi Gebremeskel, one of the players who escaped to Australia, when we spoke on the phone before I had flown to Adelaide. He was now playing for a team called White City Woodville. ‘Yes, I was scared. But life here is very good, very, very good. Everyone is happy to live. If you need to work, you can work.’
Ermias still dreams of playing pro. ‘That is everyone’s aim,’ he says. But now it is time for him to leave. He has a practice to get to and doesn’t want to be late. ‘We are going to work on playing for the Super League teams, get picked, go to the A-League.’ The thought of their sacrifice is never far away. I ask him whether he has ever thought about returning and playing for Eritrea, maybe some time in the future, if the political situation changes. ‘Waaa,’ he says, exhaling harshly. ‘Ahhh, I don’t think so, man. You know our situation. I don’t expect to go back and play for Eritrea again.’
The players who decided to flee, who were locked up together in a Nairobi refugee camp and travelled halfway across the world, have forged a strong, lifelong bond. They have integrated with the local Eritrean population, which has softened the landing somewhat. They are grateful to Australia for saving them. Not one of the players believes that they will be the last football team to flee Eritrea. And on that they will be proved correct. But that is in the future. For now, life consists of shift work, football practice, computer games, church and the occasional night out trying to pick up Australian girls. It is as normal a life as one could hope to live, but it is a normal life they have sacrificed almost everything to have.
What is the one thing you have learned during your journey from Asmara to Adelaide? I ask finally.
‘I learned that when life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, life gives you a hundred reasons to laugh. Everything is possible,’ he says before opening the door and inviting me to leave. ‘You don’t have to give up.’
4
AMERICAN SAMOA, COOK ISLANDS, SAMOA, TONGA
Apia, Samoa. November 2011.
Thomas Rongen badly needs a smoke. The coach of the American Samoa national team is pacing around the car park of his cheap motel, bemoaning the quality and availability of Samoan tobacco. ‘You can’t get good smokes anywhere here, anywhere,’ he laments in his loud, gravelly American accent that doesn’t quite disguise the inflection of his Dutch roots. Around him players dart in and out of their rooms in the wooden two-storey buildings set within thick rainforest in the Samoan capital of Apia. It is the start of Samoa’s rainy season and the searing sun is replaced by torrential downpours within seconds. But the sun is out now and Rongen looks mournfully into an empty packet of filterless Camels.
Rongen is in his mid-fifties, with a thick shock of white hair, and his stash, which he brought with him from the US, ran out days ago. On a good day he smokes with the vigour of a teenager. Stress has played its part, too, given the size of the task that lies before him: to prepare the world’s worst football team for their first 2014 World Cup qualifier. ‘I don’t see it as an obscure job to take, I see it as a unique opportunity to do something that’s a once in a lifetime gig,’ he replies when asked why he took the American Samoa job. This was his first full national team role, after coaching in the MLS and taking the US Under 20 national team to two World Cup finals. He finally finds what he is looking for, a packet of cheap, dry poor quality tobacco. He piles the brown strands into a paper and rolls a thick cigarette, three times the size it should be and minus a filter, before lighting it and blowing smoke reassuringly into the air. ‘I’m not slighting anyone but I’d not seen a lower standard of football in international play,’ he finally says. ‘I inherited this team and there were five guys literally thirty or forty pounds overweight. There was no way they could even play ten minutes if they wanted to compete at this kind of level.’
The Pacific islands of American Samoa are an unincorporated territory of the United States that has always loved football. American football, that is. It has a population of just 55,000 and produces more NFL players, and for that matter US servicemen, per capita than any single territory in the US. The national football team sits last on FIFA’s rankings and the team’s competitive record is appalling. American Samoa has played thirty matches and lost every single one of them. They have only ever scored twelve times, conceding more than 200 goals in the process. Such a record would doom a team to obscurity but that all changed after
a match that made headlines around the world and turned American Samoa into a synonym for sporting annihilation.
In April 2001 a young American Samoan team with an average age of just eighteen headed to Coffs Harbour in Australia for their first ever World Cup qualifier. The trip began badly. Almost the entire senior squad was ineligible as most of the players held Samoan passports. Samoa, unlike American Samoa, was a sovereign nation with its own national team. Only one senior player survived the cull and started that match: goalkeeper Nicky Salapu. Little did he know that he was about to take part in a game that would change his life forever. It took ten minutes for Australia to break the deadlock. By then Salapu had made a string of fine saves to keep the scores level. Then came the avalanche. When the full-time whistle went Australia had won 31-0, although the manually operated scoreboard mistakenly said 32-0. Archie Thompson scored thirteen goals that evening. Both the score and Thompson’s haul were world records. ‘I couldn’t see any reason why they would want to score so many goals,’ Tunoa Lui, the coach of American Samoa, said after the match. To date the match has had nearly three million hits on YouTube.
The 31-0 debacle prompted the Oceania Football Confederation to reconsider how it should accommodate some of the most underdeveloped and underpopulated footballing regions on the planet. While Australia successfully applied to join the tougher challenge of the Asian Football Confederation, the OFC devised a four-team, round-robin pre-qualification tournament featuring its four lowest ranked sides. I had taken four flights to get to Samoa, on the other side of the world from England, travelling so far that I crossed the International Date Line.
This year the pre-qualification tournament included American Samoa and Samoa (joint last, 204th on FIFA’s rankings), Tonga (second last, 202nd) and the favourites, the Cook Islands (196th). The winner would qualify for the next group stage against regional powerhouses Tahiti, the Solomon Islands and New Zealand. I was expecting to see another massacre, a host of double-digit scorelines against possibly the worst national team the world has ever seen. But then, for the first time in their history, American Samoa hired a respected professional coach to stop the rot.
Rongen was an unusual fit for the post of American Samoa coach, a job that had previously been filled by amateur locals or journeymen. He had pedigree. Born and raised in Amsterdam, Rongen was a promising defensive midfielder at Ajax but never made a first-team appearance for the Dutch club. Instead, in 1979, he moved to the brave new world of the North American Soccer League, where he played (and roomed) with his hero, Johan Cruyff, and Franz Beckenbauer. He married, stayed in the US and went into coaching, winning an MLS Cup with DC United before being hired by the United States Soccer Federation to coach the Under 20s national team. It was the USSF that had effectively loaned Rongen to the American Samoans. He exhales before quickly listing the types of problems he faced on arrival. ‘Coaching education is poor,’ he begins. ‘There’s no development … no proper training … they don’t play on standard proper size pitches … Transportation between the islands is poor so people don’t turn up for matches sometimes … there’s no science for strength and conditioning … the soccer IQ level is very low, lower than I’ve ever encountered … diet and nutrition is poor. You won’t believe the fast food places, people just shoving it down their throats. It’s known for obese people ...’
He has only been with the team in the American Samoan capital of Pago Pago for three weeks, trying to knock his players into shape and impart what little technical know-how he can in such a small amount of time. Tomorrow his team will face their first test, the opening match of the pre-qualification tournament against Tonga, a team they had lost heavily to in the past. In fact the biggest hurdle to overcome for Rongen wasn’t physical but mental. How do you begin to deal with a team that has been psychologically scarred by a 100 per cent losing streak? ‘There are guys like the goalkeeper who played against Australia during that 31-0 game,’ Rongen says. Nicky Salapu is the only survivor from that team that was mauled in Australia a decade before, but Rongen has decided to call him up and start him in goal. ‘This guy,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘has got some major demons going on, totally driven by the thirty-one-nothing, erasing this for himself and for his family. He is so preoccupied about it, almost crazed. He gets confronted in Seattle. People say: “American Samoa? Oh, you’re the guy that gave up thirty-one goals.” There’s some incredible scars. A lot of the guys who have lost every game. Not 2-1, or 3-2 but they’d get their asses kicked on a regular basis. So there was a defeatist attitude which I really had to change.’
As we talk, I see out of the corner of my eye a tall, beautiful woman walking past wearing a sarong, tying her long black hair theatrically into a ponytail. Rongen sees her, too. ‘On the island there is a great acceptance of people who are “hes” but are actually “shes”,’ he explains. ‘Essentially I’ve got a female starting at centre-back. Just imagine the abuse in England, or Spain or in Russia, the racial slurs, the sexual slurs.’ Johnny Saelua wasn’t known to his team-mates by that name. She was known as Jaiyah Saelua and was about to become the first transgender player ever to start a World Cup match. ‘I want to travel the world and dance,’ she says as she gracefully slides on to the bench opposite me. Jaiyah speaks softly and exudes femininity. Outside football she studies performing arts at the University of Hawaii. ‘Anything,’ she shrugs, when I ask which form of dance she prefers. ‘Modern, jazz, maybe a little bit of ballet …’
Johnny ‘Jaiyah’ Saelua is a member of the fa’afafine, a biologically male third sex that identifies itself as female and is largely accepted in Samoan and Polynesian cultures. So accepted, in fact, that Saelua has played for the American Samoa team since she was fourteen. ‘I read somewhere that it was a record when I was drafted into the national team,’ she recalls. ‘I was reserve the whole tournament and I had to leave early because I was still in high school but the coach threw me on for ten minutes.’
The role of the fa’afafine in Samoan culture is a complex one. Fa’afafine means ‘to be like a woman’ and, although widely accepted, there are still problems. According to thirty-year-old Alex Su’a, who heads the Samoa Fa’afafine Society, there are
1,500 fa’afafine in Samoa and American Samoa. ‘To be fa’afafine you have to be Samoan, born a man, feel you are a woman, be sexually attracted to males and, importantly, proud to be called and labelled fa’afafine,’ Su’a says when I meet her a few days later in a café in Apia. She is wearing make-up and earrings. No one in the café takes a second look. ‘The fa’afafine are culturally accepted. They have a role in Samoan society. They are the caretakers of the elders because their brothers and sisters get married, but the fa’afafine traditionally don’t.’ Yet homosexuality is still illegal in Samoa, and there is no legal definition for a fa’afafine, meaning that they do not enjoy the same rights. In American Samoa Jaiyah Saelua enjoys the legal freedom to be who she wants to be. But in Samoa Alex Su’a doesn’t.
Yet in one of the remaining bastions of homophobia in public life, the locker room, Saelua has not encountered the kind of abuse that she would no doubt experience in the game pretty much anywhere else in the world. ‘I haven’t had any problems with the opposition teams,’ she says, as if it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. ‘My team-mates make me feel like a part of them. They don’t make me feel different because I am the way I am. It is what anybody needs to feel wanted within a team. That is why I always do my best. I can’t let them down. We [the fa’afafine] can do what the boys do and what the girls do.’
When Saelua is out of earshot, Rongen confides that she will start against Tonga alongside a goalkeeper who holds the record for conceding the most goals in an international match. He has no idea whether his intensive three weeks of work will make any difference. Whether his players can erase the scars of perpetual defeat. Whether they now have it within themselves finally to win a match or even just to score a goal. But the experience of living in American Samoa has already left it
s mark on Rongen. ‘I’m an atheist, this country is very religious and spiritual,’ he explains. Every day he sings and prays with his team. ‘It has made me think a little more about another being out there. I try and understand their songs and sing with them. I try to pray with them.’ It was more than a spiritual awakening. American Samoa had given Rongen something back. Even if his team went on to lose every game heavily, it was football as he remembered it as a child growing up in Holland, played for the love of the game with simplicity and passion. ‘It is pure, it can’t get any purer,’ he says. ‘I kick their asses up at 4.30 a.m., the guys go to work or school, back at 5.30 p.m. and I kick their asses again and they have a smile on their faces.’ The American Samoa team is now in the car park, gathering for dinner in the sparsely laid canteen nearby. ‘Our spoilt million-dollar babies in England and Holland they would not accept this,’ Rongen says, looking at the team he has kicked into shape in front of him. The American Samoa team are quiet but intimidatingly muscular, as if built with a different sport than football in mind. ‘There would be a riot.’
**
It would be wrong to call the J. S. Blatter Stadium a stadium as such. Out in rainforest-covered hills on the outskirts of Apia, a tractor slowly chugs around a lush green pitch. Small green mounds rise on three sides to accommodate spectators while a tiny, covered stand containing a dressing room and seats for visiting dignitaries watches over the pitch from the sidelines. Opposite, a manually operated scoreboard is being prepared. The groundsman has scattered numbered wooden slats across the floor in anticipation of a hard day’s work. Tonga, too, had once held the record for the biggest hammering in world football, a 22-0 defeat against Australia. They only held it for a few days before American Samoa’s 31-0 mauling. Still, Tonga had regularly beaten American Samoa by five or six goals. No matter how bad Tonga were, American Samoa managed to be worse. Any combination of numbered slats could be possible.
Thirty-One Nil Page 10
