Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  Nearby several of the English players are scrubbing their boots clean around a single tap. ‘Justine played a big role in the recruitment of the overseas player, so thanks to him more than anyone,’ says Mikele Leigertwood after he’s removed the mud from his cleats. ‘Beating Haiti was a massive achievement and that shows how far we’ve come.’ Leigertwood had played football at the highest level and really believed that qualification was a possibility. ‘We’ve come this far against the odds so there’s no point turning up and just being out there. Yeah, they have some big names. But they are just eleven men. A lot of the players haven’t played in big stadiums, in big crowds. We’ve got nothing to fear.’

  As the English players cleaned their boots, the Antiguans walked off the training pitch separately from each other. The professionalism and fitness of the English players might have helped the country’s cause, but it had needed Antiguan goals to progress. Those had been scored by Peter Byers, the fisherman at the lake. He is currently one of the highest scorers in 2014 World Cup qualification with eight goals. ‘It’s a big, big, big challenge for all of us,’ Byers says on the sidelines after training comes to an end, speaking with a soft Antiguan lilt. ‘It doesn’t matter how big the United States is. Antigua is a hundred and seven square miles, but it’s eleven players versus eleven. So whoever puts the hard work out will be victorious.’

  Back home, Antiguans had begun to expect victory, something that Tom Curtis had tried to damp down. That didn’t deter the country’s prime minister, Baldwin Spencer. He was so excited about the match that he turned up at St John’s airport to pray with the team before sending them off. It is a deeply Christian country and the players pray before and after every training session. ‘We won’t let the people down. I know the prime minister will be watching live so we’ll give them something to cheer about. We get our prayer done because you can’t do anything in this world without the father above,’ Byers says, pointing to the sky. ‘It is good to thank Him every day even for the meal you get, even the time to play this lovely sport.’

  Sure enough, at the end of training the IMG academy’s very own lay preacher arrives to lead the group in prayer before the players leave for their afternoon siestas ‘We need all the help and inspiration we can get,’ explains Mark Bowers, Antigua’s team manager. The team form a circle around the chaplain. ‘This is a divine appointment. God’s divine appointment,’ he begins.

  ‘I never bring my bible when I come to IMG, but something said I should bring it today. I believe God has given me the word for you guys. Philippians 4 verse 6: Do not fret or have any anxiety about anything but in every circumstance and in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving continue to make your request known to God. And God’s peace will be with you.

  ‘Let’s pray together.

  ‘Lord, I pray as they prepare for Friday night and for the qualifications that lie ahead of them and they continue to pursue the dreams that you have before them, that you bless them, encourage them and strengthen them knowing that peace ultimately only comes from you our God our creator. Lord pray a blessing, a special blessing, upon this team, that … they leave it all on the field and give you all the glory.

  ‘And Lord, I pray your protection. There’s one young gentleman who had an injury this morning. I pray you heal that quickly. I commit them to you in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.’

  ‘Do you think you will score?’ I ask Byers as he leaves the pitch after the prayers.

  ‘I don’t think I am going to score,’ he replies. ‘I know I’m going to score.’

  That evening Curtis holds a team meeting in his room. The national team’s new jerseys have finally arrived from the manufacturers, but the team are not happy. There’s only enough for one each and the workmanship is poor. The federation managed to negotiate a good deal with the manufacturers. If they want more, the man from the federation says, you’ll have to buy them yourselves. For just $40. The room grumbles and complains. Why should we buy our own shirts? Shouldn’t we have more than one? What about shirts for the family back home? But the players realise it is futile and hand over their greenbacks for the extra jerseys. ‘Man, it’s a business, I guess,’ shrugs Keiran Murtagh, one of the English-born players, looking down at the single shirt in his hands. ‘If you’re not making, you’re losing.’

  **

  Tampa, Florida, USA

  The rain falls like a sheet of white metal across the causeway that links the disparate islands and marshes of the Florida Keys. The Antigua and Barbuda team sit in silence as their bus slices through the rain towards the Raymond James Stadium for their final training session. The huge angular stadium juts violently into the dark clouds above, the steep terracing open to the heavens. This is the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who play in the warmth and the dry of the autumn through to the spring. Soccer is trespassing here and has to make do with being unprotected from the rainy season. As the bus arrives twenty-four hours before kick-off, it becomes clear that the pitch – waterlogged and presently unplayable – is in no fit state for a World Cup qualifier. The rain falls like clockwork at the same time every day. If it rains like this tomorrow, the match will be in jeopardy. Curtis directs his players into the biggest dressing room any of them has ever seen. ‘I’ve been in some pretty nice dressing rooms,’ says Dexter Blackstock, who has seen his fair share of Premier League grounds. ‘But this...’ The locker room is vast, with thirty semi-walk-in pods made for giants. Without the padding and paraphernalia of American football to fill each pod up, the Antigua and Barbuda squad look like children sitting there. A desk has been set up in the corner of the room; it is manned by a FIFA official. Each player approaches one by one, passport in hand, to prove that he is eligible to play.

  Tom Curtis paces the centre of the room as the team admire their surroundings in silence before calling them to join him. The players link arms in a circle, pray, and shout: ‘ANTIGUA, BARBUDA, UNITY!’ The belly of the Raymond James Stadium is so vast that no one knows the way to the pitch. ‘Which way do we go?’ a confused Marvin McCoy asks. ‘You go out and turn right, and then out of the tunnel,’ Curtis says softly, as if directing a schoolboy to the toilet. ‘Remember because that’s the way you go out tomorrow.’ But a few minutes after the start of training there is a downpour. It is impossible even to see the players on the other side of the pitch. After a few minutes Curtis realises that the exercise is fruitless and calls off the session. The team sprint for cover. They stand by the concrete-lined tunnel, out of the rain, squeezing the water out of their shirts and watching as the pitch slowly floods. The Americans have already cancelled their training session and moved it to an indoor pitch on the other side of town. Curtis has to troop his soaking wet team back to the changing room and back on to the bus for the long journey over the causeway. There are just two last pieces of the jigsaw for Curtis before Friday’s big game. The first is a team session with Michael Jordan’s former sports psychologist who imparts his wisdom on how to approach tomorrow’s game mentally. Phrases like ‘edu-trainer’ and ‘mental training’ are used. The players snigger behind their hands, laughing at the seriousness of it all. Much more effective is Curtis’s final appointment. He has arranged for the team to watch a motivational film: the 2010 documentary Fire in Babylon. The film follows the great West Indies international cricket team of the 1970s and 1980s. That team contained Antigua’s greatest ever sportsman, Sir Viv Richards, who dominated and terrified cricket in equal measure, remaining unbeaten for fifteen years. It is a feat unparalleled in a team sport anywhere in the world. But more than that, the film was also about colonialism and freedom, and how the rise of the West Indies cricket team mirrored the rise to independence. ‘The film is about national identity,’ Curtis says in his room as he searches for the film on his laptop. ‘If the players can glean a little bit of confidence and a little bit of swagger then it can only be beneficial for them.’

  The players cram into the auditorium at the acad
emy to watch the film about how their national heroes strutted on the world stage, destroying their former colonial masters at the game they had invented. The film opens with a burst of speed and violence as one fast bowler after another powers his deliveries into the ribs, or the chins, or the arms of the batsmen before them. They cheer louder when the batsman on the receiving end is white. But they cheer loudest when Viv Richards, a man credited in the Caribbean with as much cultural and political importance as Bob Marley, appears on the screen to deliver his opening line. ‘We had a mission, and a mission to prove we were as good as anyone,’ he says to the camera. ‘Equal, for that matter.’

  **

  The next day the bus back to the Raymond James Stadium is silent again. A storm is threatening the stadium just as it did the day before but the rain has held off for now. ‘Everyone’s positive and calm, they’ve got their headphones on,’ says Curtis when we arrive at the stadium car park. ‘Yesterday was the first time we saw the stadium. All our preparations are done now. On paper we’re a tiny little island up against a superpower. It’s not a bad thing they [the US] take us lightly.’

  The Stars and Stripes were flying in their thousands in the soaking wet parking lot of the Raymond James Stadium. The pre-match entertainment is taking place out of the back of hundreds of pick-up trucks. Several thousand US fans sing the national anthem, drink beer and smoke cigars despite the sudden deluge of rain. It is their first 2014 World Cup qualifying match but also a rare chance to be in the majority during a home international. ‘We’re here and it’s going to be a pro-American crowd, which is abnormal for the States,’ explains one fan, Matt, a twenty-one-year-old student wearing a Stars and Stripes bandanna, smoking a thick cigar and drinking a beer. ‘We’re a country that has people coming from all over. Case in point: the Gold Cup match here last year, lot of Panamanian fans. In another, a lot of Guatemalan. It’s an immigrant country. Makes it difficult, soccer is not the most important sport here. It’s building, it’s getting there.’

  Sure enough, the away team is in the minority. Only a few Antiguan flags fly during the national anthems as close to 30,000 fans brave the awful conditions. The US team can call on any number of international stars. In the starting line-up is former Bradenton academy player Michael Bradley, who would soon sign for Roma in Italy’s Serie A; Fulham midfielder Clint Dempsey, who was one of the best players in Europe last season; Everton goalkeeper Tim Howard, who was a regular in the English Premier League. Antigua and Barbuda, on the other hand, have thirty-five-year-old Marc Joseph marshalling the defence: he plays for semi-professional Kendal Town in the Northern Premier League, the seventh tier of English football. Curtis has made an important decision for the match, dropping top-scorer Peter Byers and replacing him with Dexter Blackstock, the English-born striker who has only just been recruited. But Byers will get his chance.

  The match begins badly for Antigua. The crowd are singing and beating drums, the pitch of the chants higher than anywhere else I’d heard in the world. The US attack from the start. Landon Donovan is terrorising Marc Joseph. Within a few minutes they are 1-0 up. Molvin James (or Molvin Jones according to the ESPN commentator) makes a point-blank save from Herculez Gomez before Carlos Bocanegra fires home from close range. They are in complete control before Antigua and Barbuda give away a penalty, making it 2-0. Antigua only manage one attack, a glorious opening when Dexter Blackstock (or Darren Blackstock, as the ESPN commentator calls him) dawdles on the ball for too long in front of goal. Half-time comes but it could have been far worse: wave after wave of attacks have threatened to deluge the Antiguans. For a brief period it looks as if Antigua and Barbuda will be overwhelmed. But as the second half goes on Antigua grow, taking the game to the Americans. And then the moment Curtis had hoped for. He finally throws on Peter Byers. Byers harries the US back four, slaloming through them and generally being disruptive, looking for an opening. When Mikele Leigertwood gets loose down the left, he manages to loop a ball over the top. Byers cleverly spins the last defender, Oguchi Onyewu, sprints clear and passes the ball under Howard’s falling body: 2-1. The stadium is a low hum of disbelief mixed with the shrieking of excitable kids not prepared for the possibility of defeat. Antigua continue to press, looking for the equaliser that will make headlines worldwide. They have their chances, too, but they leave space at the back and the Americans score a late third when Herculez Gomez barges through everyone and scores at close range. The match finishes 3-1 but Antigua have not been embarrassed. Later, at the post-match press conference, Klinsmann expresses shock that he has been run so close.

  ‘I just said in the dressing room, everyone is a little disappointed we lost, which I think is testament to how far we have come,’ says Curtis in the emptying press room after he’s been grilled by US soccer journalists. Outside his players pile onto the bus back to Bradenton. On the road home the coach will stop at a nightclub run by an Antiguan who has invited everyone in for free to celebrate the result. The players sneak to the bar to buy beer without Curtis seeing. But it’s not yet 9 p.m. and the nightclub is dead, a tiki bar with an open dance floor decorated to look like a jungle. Around the perimeter of the dance floor are doors to motel rooms where women wait inside. It takes a few moments before we realise that all is not what it should be. We stand around a little awkwardly, aware that we are not perhaps in a nightclub after all.

  A few days later Antigua will win their first point of qualification, a 0-0 draw with Jamaica at the Sir Viv Richards Stadium. Matches against Honduras, Jamaica and, finally, the US again will decide their fate over the next year. The dream is still alive. But Curtis cannot shake the feeling that he could, he should, have won against the US on their own doorstep. ‘At one point in the second half we were close,’ he shrugs regretfully. ‘And they were worried.’

  8

  SWITZERLAND, ALBANIA, KOSOVO

  Zurich, Switzerland. September 2012.

  Fadil Vokrri and Eroll Salihu are sitting side by side in a booth in a roadside diner on the outskirts of Zurich. They look out of place, slightly suspicious, crammed together on a red leatherette banquette that is too small for two grown men. They look as if they are about to negotiate an arms deal or arrange a gangland hit. Eroll looks nervous; Fadil not at all. Both men are middle-aged and, from a distance, appear smartly dressed. Fadil has dark hair and is heavyset, wearing his suit in a dismissive, careless manner that suggests he would rather be wearing something else. He constantly pulls at the collar of his shirt, whose top two buttons are permanently undone. It is clear that Fadil is the boss. Eroll is taller, thinner, with blond hair and white shirtsleeves and tie. He looks like a sensible lab technician, the good cop to Fadil’s brooding bad cop. Eroll explains their predicament because only he speaks English. It is true. They are not from round here. And they do have an important mission to undertake in Switzerland. They have to be careful, though, Eroll goes on. What they are doing is highly sensitive with the potential to upset a lot of people. The Serbs for one. The Russians for another. And let’s not even begin with the Swiss, in whose country Fadil and Eroll’s action is about to be played out. ‘It is politically sensitive,’ Eroll agrees. ‘It is right, also.’ He stops talking when the waitress brings Fadil’s Coke (Diet) and our coffees (black).

  Fadil and Eroll are not drug dealers or people smugglers or on the run from the Albanian mafia, as far as I am aware. They are both ex-footballers from the former Yugoslavia. Both had played in the country before the Yugoslav civil war, and later in Turkey after it. Fadil had a brief spell in France, too, and had also played for the Yugoslav national team before its demise. He was considered the finest player ever to represent Yugoslavia from Kosovo. Because he was the only player from Kosovo ever to represent Yugoslavia, which is why the two men are here, in Zurich. Fadil Vokrri is president of the Football Federation of Kosovo, the FFK. Eroll is his loyal general-secretary. The opening shots of European qualification for the World Cup finals in Brazil have been fired, but Kosovo is not among the fif
ty-three teams in the draw. They are an unrecognised nation, with an unrecognised national football team. Yet, like every territory from the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo has produced an inordinate amount of talent. The problem is that, with no recognition by UEFA and FIFA, that talent has ended up elsewhere.

  Fadil and Eroll are here because they have had enough of seeing their players turn up in other national teams. In a few days’ time Switzerland will play Albania in Lucerne. Kosovars see themselves as ethnically Albanian and Switzerland has a huge Kosovar population who fled there after the final battle in Yugoslavia’s long, bloody disintegration, the Kosovo War, which took place between 1998 and 1999. Of the probable twenty-two players who will start in Lucerne, nine had either been born in Kosovo or had Kosovar parents who had fled the war, players like Bayern Munich’s Xherdan Shaqiri and Napoli’s Valon Behrami, who play for Switzerland, and Albania’s captain Lorik Cana, who plays for Lazio. ‘It’s very special for me to see two different national teams with players born in Kosovo; in fact, it’s like watching Kosovo A team play Kosovo B,’ laughs Fadil. ‘The real national team cannot be presented internationally.’ Kosovo’s quest for recognition has been thwarted at every step thanks to wider geopolitical issues, especially at the UN, and also thanks to the European Union, where five member states stubbornly refuse to recognise it. Kosovo’s attempted membership of UEFA and FIFA has met the same fate for the same reasons.