)
This book appeared in the middle of the World Cup in Brazil, when the little blanks on the match schedules for winners and scores were being pencilled in. So, the reader knew that none of the teams that figure in Thirty One Nil made it to the final draw. But James Montague, who travels to every continent and over 20 countries for this book, tells his story so well that he keeps you turning the pages all the same.
These stories are a world away from the commercialised sophistication of the European club football. That annual August-to-May jamboree offers a satvik excitement, enabling an Indian to cheer for an Ivorian, Uruguayan or Argentine and be unfazed by the lack of her countrymen in any of the teams. Instead, Montague literally falls off the map to follow teams in countries some of which require the services of Google Maps to locate and with populations smaller than New Delhi’s — Montserrat, American Samoa, Curacao, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iceland, Haiti, Lebanon and Antigua & Barbuda, among others.
These are teams that have the odds of qualifying stacked heavily against them. They are up against riots, revolutions, vicious sectarian violence, poverty and hurricanes, and some even struggle to put together a quorum of players or find decent stadiums in which to play. For many, qualifying is as much a statement of political and social identity or protest as a vehicle of hope and ambition (for the record, there’s one dismissive reference to ‘sleeping giant’ India, with its population of one billion being swept aside by United Arab Emirates, population nine million).
The title captures the pathos of it all. It is drawn from a 31-0 drubbing of American Samoa (Fifa rank 204) by Australia in 2001. This was American Samoa’s first-ever World Cup qualifier and the defeat seared into the psyche of the nation and the team for a decade.
The scoreline was partly the result of something as mundane as faulty paperwork. Just ahead of the match, most of American Samoa’s 1st XI were found to be holding Samoan passports, which disqualified them from playing. Samoa is a sovereign nation with its own national team, whereas American Samoa is an “unincorporated territory” of the US which broadly means its citizens enjoy US fundamental rights but not citizenship and other constitutional rights).
The rookie 2nd XI that eventually took the field was no match for Australia, which broke the deadlock in 10 minutes. One Aussie player alone scored 13 goals. Both that and the final score were world records.
Finally in 2011, American Samoa broke the hoodoo, beating Tonga 2-1 in a qualifier in Apia, Samoa. It was the first win after losing 30 games and conceding over 200 goals. As the team swung into the haka, the Samoan victory dance made world famous by the Samoan and New Zealand rugby teams, goalkeeper Nicky Salapu, veteran of that traumatic 31-0 loss (even though he made more than 20 saves in that game), was able to exorcise the ghost of humiliation.
That’s just one aspect of American Samoa’s victory that day. The Man of the Match award went to the team’s centre-back Johnny ‘Jaiyah’ Saelua, the first transgender player to start a World Cup match. Saelua is a ‘fa’afafine’. It is, Montague explains, ‘a biologically male third sex that identifies itself as female and is largely accepted in Samoan and Polynesian cultures. So accepted, in fact, that Saelua played for the American Samoan team since she was fourteen’.
Like Ryszard Kapuscinski decades earlier, Montague goes boldly, as it were, where few sports reporters would care to go. In Kigali, Rwanda, where the wounds of the genocidal conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis were healing under the calm sensibility of Paul Kagame’s regime, Montague is waiting for the Eritrean team to arrive. There’s some uncertainty about its arrival. That’s because in 2009, the entire national team defected while playing a tournament involving east and central African countries (the CECAFA Cup) to escape the brutal regime of President Isaias Afwerki.
Then there are teams like Afghanistan who play ‘home’ matches in a decrepit stadium in Tajikistan because of the dire security situation in their own country. Or Palestine, which has little option but to cobble its team together from its diaspora. Players from America, Chile, France and Jordan make up the starting XI. Some nearly did not make it because of exit bans by Egypt and Israel. They played their home matches in a purpose-built stadium in Ramallah financed by the French government, the Saudi king and Fifa and located 100 metres from a West Bank separation barrier built by the Israelis. Many couldn’t speak each other’s language but everyone followed the vocabulary of football (they beat Afghanistan 2-0 in Dushanbe).
In Egypt, Montague ran from gunfire during the two revolutions. In Brazil, he was caught in the anti-Cup riots in 2012 and felled by tear gas (and offers a useful tip: pour vinegar on your face to counter the effects). In the Balkans, he witnessed the aftermath of the brutal irredentism of the 1990s, not least of which was the desperate attempts by Kosovo, an autonomous enclave within Serbia, to be recognised as a separate football team. Its votaries were collecting signatures from Kosovars who play (not without controversy) for Albania or Switzerland — Xherdan Shaqiri being one of those who acquitted himself creditably in Brazil.
Quirky, fascinating, heartbreaking and heartwarming, Montague’s odyssey leaves you breathless. But he captures the spirit of the World Cup best in his Postscript. ‘World Cup qualification …has meant many things to many people. Unity, reflected power, revenge, redemption, even escape. The campaign has shown how, in the age of football’s rampant commercialisation, something as old fashioned as international football, patriotism even, is still alive. It has also shown the world is changing quicker than we realise. The mass migration of people because of wars, famine, revolution or, simply, the desire to find a better quality of life had further blurred the boundaries of identities and belonging. In many places the national football team was the last institution left that still preserved it, even if “it” … had long ceased to be.’
And all this was for the 2014 tournament. The qualifying draw for World Cup 2018 takes place in St Petersburg on July 25, 2015. Then, it starts all over again.
THIRTY ONE NIL ON THE ROAD WITH FOOTBALL’S OUTSIDERS: A WORLD CUP ODYSSEY
Author: James Montague
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 330
Price: Rs 499
