One man’s football odyssey to bring up Pohnpei
The Englishman was kicking back with his flatmate, watching his national team lose to Croatia in the rain. And with it, a summer watching the Three Lions at Euro 2008 in Austria and Switzerland was dissolving in the rain along with the job prospects of the Wally with the Brolly, Steve McClaren.
Then — echoing the words of a panicky producer in his earpiece, no doubt — the TV commentator uttered the sentence that set in train a series of events that would see Watson become a national team manager, thousands of miles from home within 12 months.
“Of course, England will still go through if Andorra beat Russia,” he whispered to the millions watching up and down England.
Ridiculous. But the straw-clutching exercise prompted the barstool debate that will be familiar to many: could you get a game with the likes of these European mountain tops that get to play at Wembley, Rome’s Olympics Stadium, the Bernabeu? The pair flicked down to the bottom of the FIFA rankings but found that even the likes of Montserrat had pros plying their trades in Europe’s football leagues. They wouldn’t get a game with the likes of Cape Verde, whose keeper who played for Tamworth in the Conference, for example.
Watson, who was working as a journalist with Football Italia at the time as well as playing semi-professionally in the ninth tier of the English game, forgot the sofa discussion about one day earning an international call up, but came home from a humiliating defeat the following day to be greeted by his housemate.
“There’s another list,” Matt said, looking up from a floor filled with the detritus of day — tea cups, print outs — researching the topic. And so there was another list, one with teams not even good enough to get onto FIFA’s world rankings.
The little countries that Sepp Blatter forgot, as Nat King Cole almost sang.
Watson clicked on a link for what would soon become his home — “They have never registered a win, and are said to be the weakest football team in the world”. He sat back in the chair, he says, and thought to himself — if he can’t play for Pohnpei, he can’t play for anyone.
“We tried to contact them with emails and surprisingly got a reply back from the guy who was the head of their FA, Charles Musana,” the author of Up Pohnpei told me this week. “And amazingly he said he’d just arrived in London. So we had this moment of: no way.
“But then we thought, you know we’ll go meet him and see what he thinks of the idea. He basically said there was a team but it fell to pieces because nobody wanted to come and coach them. So if you want to go out there and coach the team, you’ll be welcomed with open arms,” he said.
If you ever have an idea that you think may be crazy, try taking four flights over 25 hours and a couple of ferries and boats in the south Pacific and if it still seems like a runner after that, it’s sound. For Watson, he found the vacuum as they travelled to Pohnpei was filled with doubts.
But the two national team managers — they couldn’t play because of citizenship red tape — jumped straight into their new posts.
“There wasn’t really much of a football culture. People played a game that was something like football, but it involved tackles that would be immediate red cards in England. People basically head butting one another, catching the ball every now and then if they felt like it. This weird rag tag game going on.”
So like Trap landing in Dublin four years ago, you mean? “They were decent by the end of it,” Watson says. “We had a league and we picked the top players from that. We trained them up quite seriously — harder than I’d ever trained — five days a week and gym sessions and stuff on top and by the end we had a team that was really decent. And you know they were amazing athletes. So yeah, by the end we were pretty useful, I would reckon.”
I won’t give away the ending of the book but somewhere in FIFA HQ at the moment is the island’s application for full membership. They want to be on the bottom of that first list.
“Just two weeks ago they’ve submitted their official application to FIFA. They’re still waiting to hear back but they’ve had to go through a number of administrative stages which we started doing while we were on the island and we left it in the hands of the local people then.
“And they’ve carried it on, so fingers crossed.”
* adrianjrussell@gmail.com Twitter: adrianrussell
