Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  The last doubt over who will be present in Brazil is resolved that night. Portugal overcome Sweden in their play-off while Romania could not match the power and certainty of the Greeks. France managed to turn a 2-0 deficit against Ukraine into a 3-0 victory in the second match. Even in Africa the favourites all won. Burkina Faso and Ethiopia both lost out. The very same African teams that qualified for the 2010 World Cup would be heading for Brazil. Bosnia will be the only debutante in 2014. Goliath had won. David was vanquished

  ‘The future is still great for Icelandic football,’ Lars Lagerbäck says optimistically as he finally leaves the stadium. A man pushes past us with a trolley laden with crates of beer for the celebrating Croatia team. ‘I have to look at myself in the mirror and see if I am too old to continue or stay as a coach but it has been a fantastic journey for me.’ He would later sign on for two more years with Iceland, until the 2016 European Championships. He is one of the few coaches I had met in three years who has not been sacked. Lagerbäck finally gathers his distraught players. He ushers them towards the waiting coach as celebratory songs rise from the open window of the Croatia dressing room, over the Iceland team and out into the night.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Most Serene Republic of San Marino. December 2013.

  The headquarters of the San Marino Football Association can be found on the edge of Mount Titan. A brand new, angular building stands guard over an artificial football pitch where a group of teenagers are playing a game. Inside, the shelves of its corridors are adorned with pennants, medals and trophies although very few of them are for winning anything. San Marino is a micro-state near the Italian city of Rimini. It has a population of just over 30,000 and claims to be the world’s oldest constitutional republic. As you enter San Marino, before the road climbs steeply around the mountain that dominates this tiny territory, you are greeted by an arch bearing the words: ‘Welcome to the Land of Liberty’.

  Giampaolo Mazza is almost smartly dressed in blazer, shirt, tie and faded blue jeans when we meet inside. For sixteen years he has been the coach of the San Marino national team. During that time he has never won an official game, although they did once beat Lichtenstein in a friendly. In most games they would be lucky to score a goal. ‘When we play the matches,’ he says as we sit down in the boardroom, ‘we already know it is impossible for us to win or to get a positive result.’ Mazza has just finished taking charge of San Marino’s 2014 World Cup qualification campaign. It hadn’t gone well. They had been drawn in England’s group along with Ukraine and Poland. That they lost all of their games wasn’t a surprise. They are ranked 207th, and last, by FIFA, and have been for years. What was surprising was their goal difference, which finished at minus fifty-three. They had conceded fifty-four times and scored just once, against Poland in a 5-1 defeat. They had also lost 8-0 to both England and Ukraine. Although it has been worse. ‘My lowest moment was the match against Germany in 2006 when we lost 13-0,’ he recalls. Lukas Podolski scored four that night just down the road from Mazza’s office at the Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle. ‘We had many critics and many people questioning our presence in the group.’

  San Marino’s players are amateurs with full-time jobs to go back to after their inevitable defeats. The toughest part of the job over the past sixteen years, Mazza believes, has been dealing with the mental toll on the players during and after the qualification campaign. ‘The most important job in San Marino is the psychological state of the players,’ he says. ‘Our players know we will have negative results so it is important to reconstruct the spirit the day after the game so they can go back to their jobs.’ Mazza’s entire working life as a football coach has involved preparing for defeat in the least damaging way. ‘For us the positive remains with the satisfaction of playing famous teams from all around the world,’ he says. ‘Usually its teams we only see on TV and they’re pretty famous. We don’t feel defeated every time we play with the team; we try and get good results even though we know it’s impossible.’ Which begs the question: why do it? And why do it on the biggest stage of all? Mazza doesn’t even miss a beat. ‘At the last Olympics in London Usain Bolt was in the final and won the gold medal,’ he replies. ‘Before then he had to pass through qualification. Following the same reasoning San Marino should participate in these competitions. The powerful competitors meet the weaker ones. This is a question of sport.’

  **

  At the Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, Jonas Eriksson blows his whistle to bring the final match of 2014 World Cup qualification to an end. It finishes Uruguay 0 Jordan 0. The result means that Uruguay have made it to Brazil, even if all the hard work had taken place in Amman a few days before. Between the first match of qualification – in which Jay’Lee Hodgson scored twice for Montserrat in a 5-2 loss to Belize – and the last, 820 matches had been played, 2,350 goals scored and 100 red cards issued. I had travelled to every continent to watch the qualifiers, following match fixing in Lebanon, riots in Brazil and ultra-nationalism in the Balkans. In Rwanda I had learned how the national team of Eritrea had become a vehicle to escape an appalling dictatorship. The players I had met in Kigali had chosen to return to Eritrea. But a year later most of them had fled – and were granted political asylum – after playing in a tournament in Uganda. More players defected after a tournament in Kenya in December 2013.

  In Samoa I had seen how one match, Australia’s world record 31-0 defeat of American Samoa, had affected the lives of everyone involved for a decade. I’d also seen two pieces of history: the first was American Samoa’s maiden victory in any competition. The second was watching the world’s first transgender player start a World Cup match. After the 2-1 victory over Tonga, Jaiyah Saelua had played in the 1-1 draw with the Cook Islands as well as the final 1-0 loss to Samoa. ‘I don’t want to say regrets, but I wish I had played it differently against the Cook Islands,’ Jaiyah says when we speak on Skype. ‘I feel like it haunts me sometimes. We could have made it if only we didn’t score that own goal. I think about it all the time. Every time I see a park. Every time I see people in uniform [football kit] or see a ball. It doesn’t even have to be a soccer ball.’

  Jaiyah returned to Hawaii but discovered that she had been kicked out of college. They claimed she hadn’t told them she was leaving. Instead she took a job as a security guard. The money was good, and college got further and further away. There was some good news, though. Jaiyah had made an important decision. ‘I have decided to start my transition,’ she says excitedly. ‘I’ll be taking hormones and testosterone blockers, using laser hair removal. I’ve already made enough to start my breast augmentation.’ All she needs now is a start date. But there is one last thing she wants to do, something that would be impossible to do afterwards. ‘I want to play in the World Cup qualifiers for 2018,’ she says. ‘It would mean everything. I’ve been preparing for it mentally. Learning from 2011 I’ll play harder and play smarter. But I’ll play.’ That qualification campaign is likely to begin in 2014 or 2015. ‘My only worry is that my hormone treatment might get in the way,’ she says. ‘And I don’t want to jeopardise my team-mates because of my transition.’ If American Samoa fail to reach the 2018 World Cup finals, Russia will be a poorer place without Jaiyah Saelua.

  Unlike Jaiyah Saelua, the Kosovo national team was unlikely to be allowed to even dream of the road to Russia. When I’d last spoken to Fadil Vokrri and Eroll Salihu, two former players who now ran the Football Federation of Kosovo, they had proudly shown me a petition they had gathered. The petition was filled with the signatures of players who had their roots in Kosovo but who now represented Switzerland and Albania instead. Without full UN and FIFA recognition, Kosovo had haemorrhaged its substantial talent to other countries that were members. The petition wanted to show support for Kosovo’s footballing recognition, but it appeared to have had little effect. After Sepp Blatter promised an agreement on whether Kosovo could play other FIFA-recognised countries, the move appeared to have been quietly dropped.

 
But in January 2014, FIFA finally agreed to allow Kosovo to play with some restrictions. A first match was organised against Haiti in March. Edson Tavares, the Brazilian coach I had met in Port au Prince, was, of course, long gone. No Kosovo flags would allowed to be flown, nor national anthem sung in the northern city of Mitrovica. Rather than play the game in the capital Prishtina, as most had assumed would happen, the Kosovars had symbolically chosen a city that was divided between ethnic Albanians and Kosovo’s Serbian minority.

  All eyes, though, were on who would play for the Kosovo team. Would any of the Swiss players appear? The Swiss had easily qualified for Brazil, and were considered top seeds no less, largely thanks to the team’s Kosovar players. But their presence, even in a successful team, was still controversial. At least to some. In February the Swiss had voted in a referendum to restrict the amount of immigration into the country. German newspaper Die Welt highlighted the absurdity of the anti-immigration mood by tweeting a picture of the national team with the immigrants blanked out. Only three Swiss players remained.

  When I met the Swiss team before their World Cup match against Albania, and watched as the Kosovar players signed Eroll and Fadil’s petition, Bayern Munich’s Xherdan Shaqiri was the focus of the media’s attention. Now, attention had shifted somewhat to 19-year-old Manchester United prodigy Adnan Januzaj. Januzaj was Belgian born, with Kosovar parents, and an unseemly tug of love had broken out between Belgium, Serbia, Turkey and England as to which national team he should represent. At the waterlogged Adem Jashari stadium, in front of an ecstatic 17,000 strong crowd, Eroll watched as Haiti held Kosovo – minus Januzaj and Shaqiri – to a 0-0 draw. But it was a start.

  In Egypt Bob Bradley had stayed in the country as coach of the national team as it fell apart around him. But there would be no fairytale ending, at least not a conventional one. The 6-1 thrashing by Ghana in their first World Cup play-off was too much to overcome. ‘It just seemed like a day everything came together in the worst possible way,’ says Bradley when we speak. ‘Emotions, nerves, a bad start, that is what it was like. Ironically the last words from me before going out were: “You don’t win a game in the first minute, but you can put yourself in a bad position.” After the game the knives were out. There was talk that he would be fired. The Egyptian FA suggested that it might be too dangerous for him to go back but that turned out to be a lie. The return match in Cairo was to be Bradley’s first in front of a full stadium of home supporters. The Ghana Football Association had desperately tried to move the game but to no avail. Still, before the game Bradley felt the need to clear the air. ‘I took responsibility for that game,’ he says. ‘Before the second game I did a TV show, the most popular show in Egypt. It runs from 11.30 p.m. until 1.30 a.m. but went all the way to 2 a.m. I wanted to make sure the players got the respect they deserved from the Egyptians.’

  Having now spoken directly to the nation, Bradley was sure the crowd would get behind the team in Cairo for the return game. He still believed that a comeback was possible. ‘For two years we represented Egypt and Egyptian football at the highest level,’ he says, recounting the team talk he gave. ‘We still have one chance in Cairo, finishing it in a right way whether that’s a miracle or not. Maybe we can pull it off.’ With better luck, Egypt would have had a chance. In the second game they went in at half-time 1-0 up. Bradley thought they should have been 3-0 up. The game ended 2-1 to Egypt. Bradley had finally beaten Ghana, the team that knocked his US side out of the last World Cup. It seemed desperately unfair. The Pharaohs had won seven out of eight qualification matches and were drawn to play Ghana, Africa’s best side. In contrast, Mexico had won just two out of ten games and played New Zealand in a play-off.

  Bradley is now in Norway, where he was hired as coach of top division side Stabæk. When the season kicks off he’ll be the first American to coach in the top division of a European league. ‘You couldn’t find two more different ends of a spectrum: you can breathe the air, there is structure to everything and everyone’s blond.’ Egypt will never leave him, nor will his abiding memory of his time there: his relationship with midfielder Mohamed Aboutrika. ‘As a man there’s none better than Trika. Meeting him was as great an experience as you can have.’ He has a few months until the start of the season to prepare his new team and get used to his surroundings. He has also been approached by someone wanting to make a film of his life. We toss around some ideas about who should play him in the story of his life. Bryan Cranston is mentioned. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he laughs as we discuss how Cranston might approach the role. ‘My fifteen minutes were up half an hour ago.’

  **

  World Cup qualification had offered me a snapshot of the world, but the campaign had meant many things to many people. Unity, reflected power, revenge, redemption, even escape. The campaign had shown how, in the age of football’s rampant commercialisation, something as old-fashioned as international football, patriotism even, was still alive. It had also shown the world is changing quicker than we realise. The mass migration of people because of wars, famine, revolutions or, simply, the desire to find a better quality of life had further blurred the boundaries of identity and belonging. In many places the national football team was the last institution left that still preserved it, even if ‘it’ was fluid, a reality that had long ceased to be. The idea of a national team representing a nation had become more stretched and more diffuse than ever. But it still mattered, which is why people go to extraordinary lengths to play, and support, international football, with the World Cup at its apex.

  San Marino was arguably the one place where that blurring of boundaries hadn’t happened, and the result was accepting perpetual defeat. ‘We cannot take a player from a different state and give him citizenship because the law will not support it,’ says Giorgio Crescentini, the president of the San Marino FA. He is a big man who speaks slowly from behind a large desk where he keeps a small replica of the World Cup. ‘We have to build our players from the age of six until they reach the national team. In a country with only 30,000 inhabitants what we do already is a miracle.’ It takes ten years to get a passport from San Marino. As recently as 1982 a referendum was held over whether women should lose their citizenship (and with it their right to live in the country) if they marry a foreigner, as had been the case since the 1920s. Fifty-seven per cent of the population voted to keep the law.

  ‘On the one side I am proud of this special characteristic: we are pure and perhaps the only ones. This gives us pride,’ he says. Although even Crescentini concedes that some new blood would be useful. Several Serie A players have married women from San Marino. But the applications for the players’ passports were rejected. ‘Of course, if that was possible, we would do it.’ As every team from Palestine to Haiti realised, without fresh blood it’s hard to get much better. ‘We are weak,’ Crescentini agrees. ‘But we are pure.’

  **

  After sixteen years of losing almost every game Mazza resigned after the final World Cup qualifier, the 8-0 loss to Ukraine. Up to that point he was the longest serving national coach in Europe. ‘It has nothing to do with the defeats,’ he says. ‘But I think that after sixteen years it is time to leave and give the job to someone with a different approach.’ He believes that, whoever is coach, San Marino is unlikely to win a match or ever appear at a major tournament. He laughs out loud when I suggest the possibility. ‘I believe this is a dream,’ says Mazza. ‘I would be very happy if my successor wins a match. But I know that this will be almost impossible. At least from the experience I had. At the least, I wish there will be some better changes and we will not lose eight, nine, ten, eleven-nil.’

  Outside football Mazza is a PE teacher in a local school but he won’t be going far, even for such a small place as San Marino. He’ll still help coach the youth team, who are having their best ever year after the Under 21 team beat Wales recently, San Marino’s first competitive victory at any level. He’ll miss the foreign travel and the chance to coach abroad. He’ll
miss Wembley. But most of all he’ll miss the reception San Marino received after every match regardless of the heavy defeats. He’ll miss thousands of opposition fans cheering them off. What is it in human nature that makes us appreciate a team like San Marino in a completely different way, I ask. Why do we gravitate towards the underdog? ‘We prove we can play against world champions even though we are small.’ But perhaps the answer is even simpler than that. ‘Everyone who is normal,’ he says, ‘sees themselves in us.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thirty One Nil has been a huge undertaking, one that was far bigger than I had originally intended. It took me to six continents and to over 20 countries. Along the way I met hundreds of people, many of them unsung heroes, who have helped me. Without them this book would not have come to life. I apologise in advance for anyone I have forgotten.

  In the West Bank and Tajikistan I’d like to first thank Stéphane Floricien, without whom I’d probably still be in a jail cell somewhere in Russia, as well as Jerome Champagne and Susan Shalabi from the Palestine Football Association who allowed me to follow the team wherever they went. I’d also like to thank the football associations of Haiti, Rwanda, Lebanon, Antigua and Barbuda, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Bosnia, Iceland, Norway, Belgium, Oman, Jordan and San Marino for allowing me to come into their worlds. In particular, Bonnie Mugabe, Ómar Smárason, Tomislav Pacak, Aleksandar Boskovic, Abdulrahman Magdy, Tamás Sztancsik, Juraj Curny, Mark Bowers, Priscilla Duncan, Sarai Bareman, Alex Stone, Daniel Markham and everyone at Clifton All Whites FC.

  On the road there have been many people who have shared in these adventures, many of them journalists, who have also given me contacts and generally did their best to keep me out of trouble. In particular Mala Roche and everyone doing great work with Trócaire in Haiti; James Corbett in the West Bank; Aleksandar Holiga, Saša Ibrulj and Rory Smith in Croatia; Igor Resende and Seamus “El Grande Perro” Mirodan in Brazil; Amaneul Eyasu; Kenny Laurie and Karl Baz in Lebanon; Gail and Thomas Rongen, Kristian Brodie from Agile Films and Mike Brett and Steve Jamison from Archer’s Mark in American Samoa; Amr Fahmy, Hany el Haridy, everyone at Copper Pot Pictures, and Bob and Lindsay Bradley in Egypt; huge thanks to Merissa Khurma, Reema Asendar and Jonathan Wilson in Jordan; Massimo Coppola in Milan; and, finally, thank you Enzo Marino Frisoni, Amalia-Maria Rosoiu and Dadiana Chiran in San Marino for putting me up and sharing Marino’s incredible memories of appearing at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico.