Up Pohnpei: Leading the ultimate football underdogs to glory

By Paul Watson

After one too many late night discussions, football journalist Paul Watson and his mate Matthew Conrad decide to find the world's worst national team, become naturalised citizens of that country and play for them - achieving their joint boyhood dream of playing international football and winning a 'cap'. They are thrilled when Wikipedia leads them to Pohnpei, a tiny, remote island in the Pacific whose long-defunct football team is described as 'the weakest in the world'. They contact Pohnpei's Football Association and discover what it needs most urgently is leadership. So Paul and Matt travel thousands of miles, leaving behind jobs, families and girlfriends to train a rag-tag bunch of novice footballers who barely understand the rules of the game.

Up Pohnpei tells the story of their quest to coach the team and eventually, organise an international fixture - Pohnpei's first since a 16-1 defeat many years ago. With no funding, a population whose obesity rate is 90 percent and toad-infested facilities in one of the world's wettest climates, their journey is beset by obstacles from the outset. Part travelogue, part quest, Up Pohnpei shows how the passion and determination of two young men can change the face of football - and the lives of total strangers - on the other side of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781847658005

Paul Watson

Paul Watson is the youngest international football coach in the world. Before taking up coaching, he worked as a journalist for Football Italia. He lives in London.

Book preview

UP POHNPEI

PAUL WATSON was born in Lethbridge, Canada in 1984. He grew up in Bristol and studied Italian at the University of Leeds. After graduation he worked on Channel 4’s Football Italia website, ran a satirical football website called Back of the Net and co-wrote a radio show for Radio Five Live, before leaving for Pohnpei. He lives in West London.

UP POHNPEI

A quest to reclaim the soul of football by leading

the world’s ultimate underdogs to glory

Paul Watson

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

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Pine Street

Exmouth Market

London EC1R OJH

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Copyright © Paul Watson and Matthew Conrad, 2012

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84668 501 9

eISBN 978 1 84765 800 5

The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061

For Lizzie and my parents

Contents

Prologue: Pitch Imperfect

1 In Search of the Lost Cause

2 Money for Nothing

3 A Marginal Decision

4 In a League of Their Own

5 Mad Dogs and an Englishman

6 Team Pohnpei

7 Progress and Politics

8 Their Country Needs You!

9 An Injury Crisis

10 Crushed

Epilogue: Extra Time

Acknowledgements

‘We had to fly from London to Dubai, Dubai to Manila, Manila to Guam and finally Guam to Pohnpei with a forty-five-minute stop on the neighbouring island of Chuuk. Four flights and twenty-five hours in the air is a lot of time to think, but we made a valiant attempt to occupy our brains and prevent any doubts setting in.’

Prologue

PITCH IMPERFECT

‘We have a problem with toads.’

I tried to blink away the sleepy haze from thirty-six hours of continuous travel to focus on the extremely skinny teenage boy in front of me. His name was Ryan and he’d been standing on his own when we arrived at the field, trying to do kick-ups with a slightly flat ball.

I had watched, fascinated, as he repeatedly flicked the ball up to head height and then, instead of heading it, at the last minute moved out of the way.

‘Actually they have a problem with us,’ he continued. ‘This was their habitat and we built our football pitch on it. The toads have never really come to terms with it.’

‘Ah,’ I said, aware that I should sound authoritative. ‘I see.’

I turned to Matt Conrad, my flatmate and partner in this expedition to Pohnpei, a tiny island in the central Pacific. He looked as though he was feeling equally off balance. In the incredible humidity, the short walk across the field had left us both soaked in sweat and his eyes were glassy with fatigue. Never, I thought, had conditions been less suitable for a ponytail. He made the smallest of gestures towards a shrug.

That explained why there were toads leaping all over the pitch, but why was there only one player?

A week before we arrived we had been cheerfully informed in an email that ‘twenty players are turning up for practice regularly and can’t wait for your arrival’. Then again, the email had been written by Edwin Sione, who ominously signed off as ‘Pohnpei Soccer Coach’. Ominous because the sole reason we’d decided to abandon our lives in the UK and travel 8,000 miles around the world was that we’d been told there was a chance we would be able to coach football on the island. Things were going to be difficult enough, without having to depose someone from the job.

In the nervous weeks before our trip we had built up Sione into the key man we would have to deal with if we wanted to become involved in football on Pohnpei in any capacity. I imagined him as a brooding José Mourinhoesque figure, a tactical mastermind pacing the sideline, furiously protective of his patch. He had failed to pick us up at the airport as promised. On an island where just three flights arrive per week, I couldn’t help thinking this was an early attempt at mind games. I found myself glancing nervously across the field, expecting him to appear at any moment.

But our guide, Charles (Char-Les to the islanders) Musana, was unflappable. He didn’t seem the least bit concerned that the advertised 5 p.m. start time of our inaugural training session was easily half an hour behind us and just one footballer had so far come out of the woodwork.

‘People here are on island time,’ Charles chuckled, not a drop of sweat on his brow.

‘If you say five p.m. here you mean six p.m. I reckon we’ll have enough for a good game by seven.

‘You have to remember that most local people here can’t afford to own a car or even take a taxi. There’s no bus service and the only bikes on the island are owned by the Mormons, so some of our players will be walking for an hour or longer just to get to training. In the day it’s not too bad, but walking back at night you also have to deal with the dogs.’

There would be time to ask about the Mormons later, I reasoned. Unless they had mastered some form of drive-by conversion, they didn’t seem to pose an immediate threat. As for the dogs, I had already noticed them in stray packs, lingering on street corners as we had driven here. Charles had warned us to expect some unwelcome attention from them in the evenings but cheerfully reassured us that Pohnpei was rabies-free.

I looked across PICS Field (the understandably commonplace acronym for ‘Pacific Island Central School’) and tried to imagine it as a fortress of football, a field of dreams.

Behind each semi-collapsed, netless goal, rolling hills of thick, shockingly green vegetation rose into the distance. Over the years the solitary stand had rotted under the continuous onslaught of one of the world’s wettest climates. Puddles of that day’s rainwater dotted the uneven pitch. It seems there weren’t too many takers for the exhausting, thankless and expensive task of groundsman on an equatorial island.

At six o’clock the player count was still one. Including myself, Matt and Charles that made four of us.

‘Well, we should definitely play a game of some kind,’ said Matt.

‘Yes,’ I agreed wearily. ‘Eight thousand miles for a game of two v. two. Great.’

It was made worse by the clear signs of life coming from the basketball court a few hundred metres away.

Always prone to fatalism, I had now become so sure that nobody would turn up that I was slow to notice the first players arrive. I turned round to find two identical men shaking hands with Charles. In my fragile mental state I feared I was hallucinating.

‘Paul, these are the Paul brothers: Bob and Robert,’ Charles offered by way of an explanation. I was greeted with the briefest of nods and a half-hearted handshake.

The two men quickly separated as Bob (or was it Robert?) went over to Ryan and gestured for the ball.

‘Bob and Robert are twins,’ said Charles, leaning in conspiratorially. ‘They live in the same house but they can’t stand each other.’

I nodded dumbly as the other twin walked a little way away and produced a small bag of lime powder, a leaf and a thumbnail-sized betel nut – the ingredients needed for an intoxicating chew. Almost every local we had met so far had been a betel-nut devotee, despite the habit’s side effects of rotting teeth and stained red gums. The trade-off for such dismal oral hygiene was said to be an anaesthetic effect experienced as a numbing of the mouth that slowly progressed to the rest of the body. Although aware of the drug’s ubiquity from my pre-trip research, I still couldn’t help but feel slightly troubled at seeing people drive cars and operate heavy machinery unashamedly under the influence of this potent narcotic. Many Pohnpei pavements were stained metallic red by betel-nut juice, despite signs requesting pedestrians not to spit, although the more considerate chewers carried around beer cans for that purpose.

We now had three players, two of whom had my first name as their surname, looked identical and had variants on the same first name. I was trying to work out how I was ever going to distinguish between them when half a dozen or so other figures drifted across the field. I straightened my back, aware that any one of them could be Edwin Sione and desperate to look professional. Charles greeted the newcomers and introduced them to Matt and me for a handshake. It was hard not to feel like a member of the royal family at the FA Cup Final.

‘This is Roger. I first taught him to play when he was six. He’s walked all the way from Nett, which is miles away.’

Roger had long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. He bowed slightly as he shook my hand and backed away with a friendly grin.

Next in line were another set of brothers, Charles and Joseph Welson. Joseph was seventeen and allegedly had the hardest shot on the island, while Charles, four years Joseph’s senior, was a goalkeeper.

Charles smiled at me. Joseph adopted more of a sneer. He didn’t appear to have any teeth: another betel-nut fan.

‘This is Rocky. He is a very athletic young man and he is one of the most dedicated players. Even when we aren’t playing he comes and runs laps round the track.’ Rocky offered us a facial expression somewhere between a grin and a scowl. After the briefest of nods he almost sprinted back to the other side of the pitch in a desperate attempt to avoid any small talk.

The introductions continued, coming thick and fast. I’ve never been particularly good at remembering names and my cause wasn’t made any easier by the almost uniform haircut the players sported: one very long strand of hair running down their back, with the rest cut fairly short. This style, affectionately known as the ‘rat tail’, is seen almost as a status symbol, and takes years to grow. Like many seemingly Pohnpeian phenomena, the rat tail was borrowed from a mixture of outside cultures; the style had been very popular in Japan in the 1980s and Australia in the early 1990s and, while it had died out elsewhere, it had stuck in Pohnpei and become a badge of national identity. There’s a story that one American basketball coach, an ex-military man, disapproved of the style and forced his players to shave off their rat tails. Many of the young lads went home in tears. The coach didn’t last long after that.

After a lot of nodding and smiling, Matt and I explained we were going to have a practice game that evening. As I spoke, I realised that, rather than listening, most of the players were staring at Matt and me with open fascination. Matt sidled closer to me.

‘It’s the shorts, dude,’ he said, stage-whispering out of the side of his mouth.

I looked at him blankly but he just tugged his shorts and looked meaningfully at me.

After a few moments, in which I thought the heat had sent him over the edge, I saw what he meant. Without exception the locals had opted for the long, baggy style of shorts – compared to them our shorter-than-knee-length versions must have looked like thongs.

Notwithstanding the baffled glances, we finally had the chance to give out some of the mountain of football equipment that we had brought with us. We handed out boots, socks, shin pads and the hard-won Yeovil Town and Norwich City shirts we had lugged halfway across the world.

The players pulled on their League One attire as if it were the most natural thing in the world, allowing Matt and me to breathe a sigh of relief that our trip hadn’t been an inadvertent act of British football colonialism: a crusade by gung-ho football missionaries. It was almost inconceivable to us that anyone could not love football, but such creatures exist all over the world. What if we had found an island of people for whom the beautiful game held no appeal? A bag full of lower-league memorabilia couldn’t solve that problem and would appear at best an act of misguided charity. Some players rejected the boots, preferring to play barefoot. Others had their own pairs that ranged in condition from coming apart at the seams to completely shredded.

The numbers had swelled, with more players introduced to us and more smiling and nodding until there were ten on each side. Matt and I lined up in midfield for opposing teams, hoping to establish the lie of the land while setting some sort of example.

Within minutes we could see that, although there was no shortage of enthusiasm, the game was a mess. One lad would get the ball and run ninety yards in a straight line before being brought down by one or more of a deep puddle, a toad and an opposition player, while another would boot the formerly white but now muddy brown ball off the pitch, over the stand and on to the road.

The players kept a safe distance from us, still openly sizing us up. Whenever Matt or I received the ball the opposition would give us a respectful five yards of space. There was no such treatment for Charles Musana, who was clearly a very talented player. One of the Paul twins (Robert, I think) clattered Charles before muttering an apology, offering his hand and charging off to find his next victim. He saved his worst foul for his brother Bob, who was goal hanging for the other team. A couple of seconds before Bob received the ball, Robert flew into him at waist height in something resembling a rugby tackle.

Players had no real idea what constituted a foul or how a pair of studded shoes and eighty yards of built-up momentum could damage another human. Tackles went flying in. Red-card challenges that would have sparked a full-team punch-up in an English Sunday League match were followed by a rueful smile and a slight wince.

There had clearly been precious little, if any, formal coaching on the island. But more than that, as most of them had never seen football on the television, the style of play was bizarre, bordering on alien. Even the least talented child playing football in a British park knows how to look like a footballer, how to spit, to raise their hands in despair at a poor pass or celebrate a goal with a clenched fist. There was none of that here.

I was shocked when the painfully polite Roger, who called me ‘sir’ when we were introduced, turned out to be the most ostentatious of the players, attempting the most spectacular of overhead kicks or diving volleys when a simple shot would have sufficed. Over the course of the match he performed enough acts of gymnastic brilliance to secure a medal at the Olympics, but he made little impression on the game. Nonetheless, a grin never left Roger’s face, even when he was flattened by an opposition player or berated by a teammate.

We watched as, time and time again, our guide-to-toads Ryan would get himself into a good position, only to shrink back as another player came close: at one point he was perfectly placed to score a header but ducked out of the way at the last second, repeating the baffling technique we had seen him practising when we first arrived. Joseph proved why he was regarded as having the hardest shot on the island, scoring a thunderbolt of a goal, and when I’d whooped and clapped, he nodded and trotted back down the pitch, not even catching my eye.

My pre-trip reading on social norms in Micronesia had taught me that shouting orders, instructions or criticism is simply not done. Our guide Charles told us that if we reprimanded a player for anything, he would appear unfazed but would never show up again, unless we visited his family home and apologised. While it wasn’t clear whether this had ever actually happened on the football pitch, there were plentiful stories of decades-long feuds caused by offences as minor as a spilt drink. In a tiny island community, the smallest perceived snub could be a fatal faux pas and being a rare foreigner in this environment meant that every action’s significance was multiplied a hundredfold. It left Matt and me trailing around the pitch, calling out apologetically, trying desperately not to sound critical as we suggested to one of the players that perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to run as fast as he could and slide head first into a player from twenty metres.

It didn’t sound like a football game either. Every mistake was greeted by a howl of laughter from its perpetrator. The importance of saving face was so great that to miss a chance from six yards was unthinkable, whereas to intentionally sky the ball with the goal at your mercy was respectable. For a Pohnpeian, to try but fail is the ultimate embarrassment, but to try to fail is fine. The only vaguely recognisable feature was the mocking note in goalkeeper Charles Welson’s voice after he made a one-on-one save or the grunt of disapproval from an unmarked striker watching a cross fly over the crossbar.

The odd contest was nearly an hour old when Charles Musana jogged up to me, tapped me on the shoulder and whispered ‘Edwin Sione’, nodding in the direction of a dark-haired man very deliberately lacing up his boots on the side of the pitch. My nemesis. I felt my throat tighten. I signalled to Matt, who was breathing hard, his hands on his knees, and he straightened to watch him too. This would be it, the moment of reckoning. Time seemed to slow as he pulled each lace tight and stood. He was disarmingly short, not much more than five feet, but I knew that what happened next would be key to the whole project.

I watched as the great man jogged on to the pitch. And then ran towards the ball clucking like a chicken and barking, ‘Pass, pass to chicken man.’ Within ten minutes, Sione had declared the goalkeeper to be offside and intentionally controlled the ball with his hand, arm and buttocks. I met Matt’s eyes and could see him biting his lip trying not to laugh. We began to feel maybe we had overestimated him.

We also began to wonder whether it was realistic to imagine anyone instilling order here. Although we tried to offer advice, there wasn’t much of a sense that anyone was listening. Language was partly to blame for that. As an American protectorate, the official language of Pohnpei is English. However, it quickly became clear that locals were happier communicating in their native Pohnpeian. Despite being heavily influenced by the tongues of Pohnpei’s previous occupiers – English, Japanese, German and Spanish – the language somehow sounded completely alien. Sentences were punctuated with unfamiliar howling and clicking noises. Every now and again an English word would be used, followed by raucous laughter. It was a recipe for paranoia.

We were pretty sure as the game continued that the players were discussing us in detail and pretending not to understand us when it suited them. To make matters worse, our very English football vocabulary would probably not have been understood anywhere more exotic than Acton. References to bibs fell on deaf ears and a shout of ‘man on’ met with head scratching; even ‘don’t slide in with two feet’ had to be abridged to ‘don’t kill him!’

We called time on our maiden game in Pohnpei once it became pitch black. Floodlights had once lit the field brightly, but now fewer than half a dozen functioning bulbs remained. Buying new ones from Japan had clearly never quite made its way to the top of the to-do list. Team Yeovil had come out as the resounding 8–4 victors, mostly thanks to Joseph’s unstoppable right boot, although few of the goals would have stood had there been a qualified referee – and there certainly wouldn’t have been many players left on the pitch.

The equipment was laboriously collected back in. Charles had advised us to do this at the end of every session, even though he had known the players for years. It wasn’t that they would steal it, but in such a gerontocracy as Pohnpei, family elders could demand the possessions of younger relatives and etiquette demanded that they would never be able to ask for them back. Most families on Pohnpei don’t own much, so any new items would be brought to the patriarch for examination, approval and possibly redistribution to another member of the family. The next we would see of our kit would be on a stranger wearing it while walking to the shops.

Rocky, clearly disappointed that the session was over, handed back his bib, nodded and walked away. Ryan folded his kit neatly and quietly wished us a pleasant evening. Bob and Robert succeeded in walking off with their boots on, but luckily Charles was on the ball and called Bob back just as he threatened to disappear into the night. Bob very slowly brought back the two pairs of shiny new boots, mumbling that he and his brother had been playing a prank on us. (When he left once more, Charles explained that to some degree Bob was telling the truth: he had expected to be caught, but that unchallenged he would very happily have worn the boots home.) Edwin Sione was conspicuous by his absence. He had skulked off when we started to collect the equipment in, leaving us to wonder exactly what he made of our arrival.

‘So, what do you think?’ asked Charles. ‘Of course, there

Reviews for Up Pohnpei

[big_bang_gorilla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In which two English dreamers who aspire to play for a national team determine that the worst national team in the world, and hence the one they have the best chance of playing for, is the Central Pacific island of Pohnpei. When research reveals that even the worst national teams have players who are on professional or semi-professional teams, often in Europe, they decide to switch to coaching. And so they turn up in Pohnpei and try to set up first a national league and then a national team. The book has two threads; the first is the football and the second is clawing through corporate and football bureaucracies trying to find funding. The book is engaging, and it's easy to care about the success of the endeavor.