Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  Just as well. Antigua and Barbuda, with a population of 81,000 people, will play the United States (pop: 312 million) in a few days’ time. The match will take place in the vast Raymond James Stadium, built for the sport that most Americans regard as the truest form of football. Its open stands are home to NFL side the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, perhaps most famous for being the first love – if that’s the right word – of the Glazer family that owns Manchester United. It is a stadium that holds almost as many spectators as the entire population of Antigua and Barbuda.

  When the bowl is full of fish, Byers and Forde hand back the rod and thank a slightly bemused Joe before taking the haul back to their shared apartment in a building overlooking the lake. Within a few minutes the place is full of smoke. The fish have been doused in pepper sauce and Byers is now frying them one by one in the pan before dishing them out with a spatula on to the plates of four expectant team-mates. Byers serves himself last, sits down at the table and, holding a fried bluegill in both hands, tears at its blackened skin with his teeth, occasionally pausing to pour more hot sauce on to the fish. He stops suddenly and looks up. ‘Don’t tell coach,’ he says, and returns to the catch of the day.

  **

  In the next building, the ‘coach’ has no idea what his star striker is up to. The man in charge of Antigua and Barbuda is Tom Curtis, a young Englishman in only his second coaching job. The US, on the other hand, is being coached by former German international Jürgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann has won the World Cup and European Championship as a player and has coached both Bayern Munich and the German national team. Curtis’s main claim to fame was being part of Third Division Chesterfield’s memorable FA Cup run to the semi-finals in the mid-1990s. If the US qualifies for Brazil it will be the seventh time they have made it to the finals. It is the first match for the US in the 2014 competition while Antigua and Barbuda began their campaign a year ago and have never got close to even considering themselves World Cup material. Until now. A series of incredible results against bigger opposition has seen them reach the penultimate round of qualification for the first time ever. When the draw for the group stage was made, the US was first out of the hat, alongside Guatemala and France ’98 finalists Jamaica.

  Tom Curtis appears nervous when we meet for the first time. ‘Come in, come in,’ he beckons, inviting me into his apartment a stone’s throw from the lake from which I have just seen his star striker pull his dinner. There hasn’t been much interest in Antigua and Barbudan football over the past two decades, which might explain his nervousness. Or perhaps his air of apprehension is as a result of his experiences with Britain’s sporting press, who took a fleeting interest in him fifteen years ago. ‘It was a crazy time,’ he had told me earlier. ‘The high point of my career, no doubt. Until now, that is.’ Curtis is thirty-nine now but looks no different from the blond, wiry midfielder who could once be seen scampering up the wing for Chesterfield. That team – which also featured a teenage future England international in Kevin Davies – produced one of the competition’s great performances by an underdog in the modern era. Curtis had only been training with the club part-time as he studied for a degree yet he became a key part of Chesterfield’s success, scoring the deciding penalty in an earlier round to knock out former European Cup winners Nottingham Forest, then in the Premier League and coached by Stuart Pearce. He was destined, it seemed, for great things. But they never really arrived. Curtis played at lower and lower levels until he finally hung up his boots last year while playing for the non-league Loughborough University team.

  It was at Loughborough that Curtis found his true calling, coaching the team until he was head-hunted by the Antigua and Barbuda FA to coach not just its national team but also the island’s only professional outfit, too: the Barracudas. It was a brilliant first job for a new coach. The Barracudas would give him a day-to-day coaching role. The Antigua national team job was a win-win situation. Both teams were made up of locally based stars and British-born players. Strong ties remain between the two countries but the biggest improvement in the team has come from the home-grown players. The Barracudas now play in the USL Pro League, the third tier of American soccer. Previously players would have jobs in factories or on fishing boats while training in the evenings. Now they can focus full time on football. ‘The Barracudas is the only Caribbean side playing pro outside the region,’ he says when we sit down. He is still a little guarded. ‘The purpose of the Barracudas is to develop the national team. A lot of thought has gone into it.’ But he soon discovered one major impediment to developing his players: the Caribbean islands didn’t have a single football pitch between them. ‘We don’t have any football-specific facility,’ he admits. ‘We play on cricket grounds, the Sir Vivian Richards Cricket Stadium, which was built for the 2005 Cricket World Cup. We train at the ARG, which is a world-famous cricket venue. We don’t have good surfaces to be able to train but still we’ve produced a competitive team.’

  Antigua and Barbuda is a cricket country, a colonial legacy left by the British from whom independence was won in 1981. Despite Antigua’s size it has produced some of the greatest cricketers the world has ever seen, players like the peerless Sir Viv Richards, Richie Richardson, both of whom would captain the West Indies during their dominance of international cricket, Andy Roberts and Curtly Ambrose, arguably the greatest fast bowler of the modern era. Football has always been cricket’s poor relation in Antigua and previous football World Cup qualification campaigns were littered with beatings and concluded in failure. This qualification campaign was to be different. For eighteen months, Curtis explains, the Barracudas had given his players a taste of professionalism. Initially it was tough. Time-keeping was a big issue. Curtis is big on time-keeping. ‘You can’t just plonk someone into a professional team and expect them to have a professional life straightaway,’ he concedes. ‘Many of these guys have only been pro for six months so it’s not easy to slip into. But they produce great athletes. Look at the cricket.’

  Antigua and Barbuda were not meant to get out of their group. They had never been out of the first round before. In qualification for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa they played Cuba home and away, and lost 8-3 over the two games. This time they had been drawn with the US Virgin Islands, Curaçao and, the favourites, Haiti. Nine months earlier, after I had watched Haiti smash six goals past the US Virgin Islands in their first qualifier of the campaign in Port au Prince, the players, officials and the Brazilian coach Edson Tavares had all told me that the crucial matches that would decide who won the group, and so clinch the single qualifying spot for the next round, would be when Haiti played Antigua and Barbuda home and away in the final two matches of the group. It would, they reasoned, effectively be a two-leg play-off.

  Curtis’s team came racing out of the blocks, winning the first four games in a row and scoring an incredible twenty-six goals in the process, including 10-0 and 8-1 victories against the US Virgin Islands. Haiti scored seventeen goals in their first three matches, but then it all went wrong against Curaçao in Port au Prince. They could only manage a 2-2 draw, and that was after going 2-0 down in the first half.

  The crunch meeting came when the two met in Antigua’s capital, St John, in November. The dropped points meant Tavares’s Haiti team had to avoid losing or they were out. Tavares set his team up for a draw, in the hope that Antigua and Barbuda would wilt in the final game in the cauldron-like atmosphere I had experienced for myself at Port au Prince’s Stade Sylvio Cator.

  The match took place, as every home game had to, in a circular cricket ground. A football pitch had been painted out in the centre of the Sir Viv Richards Stadium but two cricket wickets could be seen clearly in the middle of the field. There were only a thousand fans in the stadium to witness Haiti’s near-total possession. Their dominance was to be expected, given that almost the entire starting eleven were professional players from France, Belgium and beyond. Only five of the team that started in the match I had seen in Port au Prince against the US
Virgin Islands did so against Antigua. Tavares had accelerated his acquisition of foreign-born and foreign-raised players, and a new raft of the Haitian diaspora, some of whom had once played for the France and Switzerland Under 21 teams before switching allegiance, had been recruited. Gone was Steward Ceus, the huge New York-born goalkeeper who had begun the campaign, replaced by Johnny Placide, who once played for France Under 21s. When I had spoken to Tavares about his controversial recruitment from the diaspora he had talked excitedly about Placide. ‘He is one of the best goalkeepers in France,’ he told me. ‘We are trying very, very hard to get him.’

  Antigua and Barbuda survived the first half but as Haiti’s desperation grew they threw men forward, giving Tom Curtis’s side the better chances. And then, in the eighty-third minute, striker Kerry Skepple – who had once played a handful of games in the Finnish second division – hit a tame shot from outside the penalty area. Somehow Placide managed to misjudge the ball. It hit his right glove, slipped through his hands and into the goal. It was a dreadful and decisive error. When the full-time whistle was blown, the Haiti players lay, face down, all over the pitch. They had been eliminated, and it was, according to the Haitian federation, all Edson Tavares’s fault. ‘The coach really killed the dream of a nation,’ an angry Henry Robert Dominique, the Haitian Football Federation spokesperson, told the Antigua Observer after the game. ‘He really killed the dreams of fourteen million people and maybe because he is a foreigner, he is from Brazil and he doesn’t understand what it means to wear the Haitian flag that we fought for along with independence way back in 1804 … and this is the dream of the Haitians, to go to the World Cup.’

  Not content with that, Dominique went further. ‘He wanted to make his own move to be a hero. Now he is a zero. For the Haitian nation, the coach Tavares is a zero … Any soccer player in the world could have seen that Haiti was the better team tonight. But that wasn’t enough. We need management. We need soccer fields. We need soccer balls. We need to send the kids to school and we want to say thank you to the president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, who is going to help the country with a new generation looking for change.’ Unsurprisingly, Tavares was fired.

  ‘Haiti were the obvious favourites in the group,’ recalls Curtis of that historic game. ‘They’d been to the ’74 World Cup, they give top teams great games and they have players at Lens and PSG.’ Curtis had agreed with Tavares that the atmosphere in Port au Prince would give Haiti a huge advantage and wanted to avoid going there needing a result to make it to the next round. ‘Everyone told me Haiti was a difficult place to go to, both to get a result and because the crowd was so ... hostile.’ For the first time in a year I thought of the riots outside the stadium in Port au Prince before Haiti’s first World Cup qualifier, and of the US Virgin Islands’ coach passing by, players opened-mouthed and wide-eyed with terror as the violence unfolded before them. ‘We rode our luck,’ he admits. ‘We hung on. The celebrations were fantastic, everyone was on the pitch. Everyone was ecstatic.’ It was the greatest moment in Curtis’s short coaching career. ‘When we won the Haiti game I thought, oh my word, we’ll have to play against USA and Jamaica,’ he says. ‘A friend said: “Don’t worry, it’s a long way off.” It seemed a long way off. All of a sudden we are here.’

  During that time Curtis has found it almost impossible to arrange any friendly matches with anyone, partly due to the fact it’s so expensive to play another national team and partly because they are historically considered one of the worst teams in the world. Nobody wanted to play Antigua and Barbuda unless a lot of money changed hands. While the US had prepared for the Antigua match playing marquee friendlies against top teams, Antigua and Barbuda hasn’t played anyone. Well, hardly anyone. ‘We’ve had to play local sides and amongst ourselves, which isn’t ideal, but it’s something we have to deal with as a small nation,’ he says, with no little understatement. The problem is money. Organising international friendlies is an expensive business. ‘There’s stadium rental, appearance fees for foreign teams and these are things that we just cannot afford,’ he says, before pointing to the fixtures in his plush apartment: a flat-screen TV on the wall, expensive carpets, ice cold, silent air conditioning. ‘We’re staying here but it’s taken a bit of wheeling and dealing. We’re not like US soccer, we don’t have the same infrastructure or the financial backing. They’ve played Scotland, Brazil, Canada.’

  Soccer is one of the rare arenas in almost any aspect of global culture in which the United States might be considered a minnow. At least for now. Even in a regional context, Mexico has prided itself on being CONCACAF’s true futbol heir. Yet, if they made it, this would the United States’ seventh World Cup. It is also an emerging football superpower, with a booming domestic league, impressive resources, a huge talent pool and a top coach. The United States could very well one day produce a team capable of winning the World Cup. For Antigua and Barbuda the US game was a very different proposition from thrashing their cousins in the Virgin Islands, or plotting the downfall of a country crippled by natural disaster. How do you even begin to prepare to play a team when the odds are so stacked against you? ‘It’s the players against the players not me versus Jürgen,’ says Curtis, almost a little hurt by the question. ‘We watched all the recent games the States have played. They played well in some,’ he says as if about to deliver a back-handed compliment. ‘But we’ve looked at their side and come up with a little plan that might upset them.’ Part of that plan has involved taking the US on at their own game: sports psychology, visualisation techniques, cutting edge training methods cross-pollinated from other high-performance sports like rowing and rugby. ‘We’ve been having sessions with a team psychologist who worked with [200-metres Olympic gold medallist] Michael Johnson,’ Curtis says with excitement. ‘It’s really positive stuff around the camp at the moment.’

  It’s time for Curtis to gather his players for the afternoon training session. What will be the last piece of advice you give the players before they leave the dressing room, I ask him before he goes. ‘When you have a group going into a 75,000 stadium, against some of the best players in the world, the last piece of advice I have to give them is to calm them down,’ he says. But there isn’t any expectation-damping, no bowing and scraping, no gratitude that he is happy just to be here. ‘We’ll give them a game,’ he says confidently before leaving to meet the team.

  **

  The accents on the training ground sound familiar to an English ear; Yorkshire, Black Country, London, Manchester. The Antiguans are training in the Florida humidity as flashes of lightning streak in the distance. Curtis isn’t exactly an outsider here. Such are the close colonial ties between Britain and Antigua that several dozen players plying their trade in the English Premier League and below qualify to play for the national team. It is a pool of talent they were quick to exploit. ‘I remember the first time I joined the national team they were talking at the time about getting to the 2010 World Cup finals and I thought: “Really? We can just about control the ball,”’ says thirty-year-old midfielder Justin Cochrane, laughing as he remembers how rudimentary the set-up was back then.

  Cochrane is a British-born midfielder who had just been released by non-league Borehamwood and was a coach with the Tottenham Hotspur youth team. He was the first English-born player to represent Antigua and Barbuda and now has a vital role to play in the squad. He doubles up as the team’s unofficial chief scout. His job is to keep an eye out for any players he comes across in English football who he thinks might qualify for Antigua and Barbuda through their parents or grandparents. When he’s satisfied there’s enough of a connection to meet FIFA’s nationality rules, he approaches them with an offer of international football that they will probably never get from the England team. ‘The management are constantly asking: “Is he Antiguan? His surname’s Antiguan ...”’ he says of his unofficial role. ‘I knew a lot of guys from playing professional football in England and I only have to ask a couple of questions to find out if they
had any Antiguan heritage. So I’ve titled myself as Head of Recruitment.’ His work has so far uncovered some impressive names, the likes of midfielder Mikele Leigertwood, who is playing in England for Championship side Reading, as well as Nottingham Forest striker Dexter Blackstock, who was once considered a potential international for the country of his birth after playing for the England Under 18, 19 and 21 teams. In the five years since Cochrane arrived he has been responsible, in part, for building a completely different type of national team. ‘I’ll get an email from the head of the Antiguan FA: “Can you find out if he’s Antiguan?”’ he explains when I ask about the process for recruiting potential new players. The biggest recruiting tool, though, isn’t his sleuthing ability. It is matches against the likes of the US. ‘The stature of this type of game will mean more and more will come.’

  Virtually every national team I had met so far had employed the same tactics as Cochrane and the Antigua and Barbuda federation. And the same problems had arisen in every team. Resentment by and division among the local players. The new players might look like them, and might even speak their language, but they weren’t their kin, not at first anyway. They were usurpers, outsiders, ‘invaders’, as the Haitian president Michel Martelly had called the foreign-born and raised players of Les Grenadiers after they had been eliminated from World Cup qualification. The import of these professional players from afar usually came with a subtext besmirching the abilities of the local players, even if that was unintentional. In many cases it wasn’t even talent that was the issue. Local players with many of the teams I had seen were better, more technical. But the foreign players were fitter and could last the full ninety minutes. Every team, from Palestine to the Cook Islands, had somehow to heal the rift that inevitably emerged between the two sets of players. Antigua and Barbuda was no different. ‘Initially there was a bit of friction, yeah,’ Cochrane agrees. ‘At first the guys weren’t too welcoming. The Antiguan-born guys are different. They are not all high fives and hugs. They are a lot more quiet. But now we are together.’ Victory, as ever, is always the best answer to division. ‘Now there’s a belief we can actually do something in this group,’ he says with genuine optimism. ‘The top two qualify [for the final round]. And why not? Why not have the belief? There have been bigger giant-killing results in football in the last hundred years. It’s not just this one game, we have six games to get the points.’