International football isn’t supposed to be anything like Sunday League. Yet as Bradley Woods-Garness and Dean Mason made their Montserrat debuts, that was the reality facing the Caribbean islanders.
Anchored to the bottom of the FIFA world rankings, with scant resources and only a handful of players even fit enough to manage 90 minutes, they were all too familiar with being on the receiving end of humiliating scorelines. Montserrat had lost all 17 of their previous matches as a FIFA member, suffered a 20-0 World Cup qualifying defeat on aggregate to Bermuda in 2004, and sometimes it was an achievement for them just to get a team out.
So when Woods-Garness and Mason – a couple of ringers from non-league who’d never played outside of England – joined up with the Emerald Boys for the first time in 2012, they were in for a culture shock.
“It was literally just us, [fellow non-leaguer] Alex Dyer who’d started before us and guys who weren’t up to the standard,” remembers Woods-Garness, who was turning out for Canvey Island in the seventh tier at the time. “There were players there who were friends and family of people, and weren’t proper footballers. Some of them weren’t match-fit. It was a bad time.”
Montserrat had even been awarded the questionable honour of being the world’s worst national team in 2002 when Bhutan beat them 4-0 in the so-called Other Final, a match played between the two lowest-ranked FIFA sides on the same day as the World Cup final. Things hadn’t got an awful lot better in the decade since.
For all Montserrat’s myriad struggles on the pitch, it wasn’t just talent that they were lacking. “When I started, we used to have to wear an old Prostar kit,” Mason tells FFT. “On matchdays, you were told to wear black jeans and a green T-shirt with a horrible polo neck, and I remember one training session when the manager couldn’t get enough bibs together, so he sacked it off.”
It might not sound much
