Island Games in Rhodes

In the forthcoming issue of World Soccer magazine, I've written about the football
tournament at the 2007 Island Games in Rhodes, where Gibraltar beat the hosts 4-0 in the final with four second-half goals.

A total of 11 places took part in Rhodes with the Spanish island of Minorca making their debut.

But a large number of the teams that played in the previous tournament in
the Shetlands did not take part, including the hosts, who won that tournament.


Gibraltar versus Rhodes

Island Games in Rhodes

In the forthcoming issue of World Soccer magazine I've written a piece about the football tournament at the 2007 Island Games in Rhodes, where Gibraltar beat the hosts 4-0 in the final with four second-half goals.

A total of 11 places took part in Rhodes with the Spanish island of Minorca making their debut.

But a large number of the teams that played in the previous tournament in the Shetlands did not take part, including the hosts who won that tournament.

Gibraltar, in the red shirts, on their way to victory over Rhodes.

Football under the midnight sun

Sami cup winners Stil (photo: Ante Jovna Gaup)

I was in the far north of Norway last week, to see the Sami Cup. Here's an extract from my account of the tournament for The Guardian:

An indigenous Nordic tribe known to most people outside of Scandinavia as Laps, the Sami have rejected the latter term after decades and have reasserted their traditional name. Reindeer-herding and lasso-throwing are traditional Sami sports but since the first Sami Cup was held in 1978, the tribe have taken football to their hearts.

Two thirds of the 70,000 Sami live in Norway, another 20,000 in Sweden, with 5,000 or so in Finland and the rest on the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The Sami Cup was set up to help reunite this disparate northern people with teams made up of relatives, local associations and reindeer herders getting together to play football. More than a dozen Sami football tournaments will be staged this summer but the Sami Cup, rotating annually between Norway, Sweden and Finland, is the big one.

Forewords by Adrian Chiles and David Conn

With the book nearing publication, I've just recieved the forewords from broadcaster (and West Brom fan) Adrian Chiles and journalist David Conn.

Here's an extract from Adrian's piece:

So where is the soul of football? I think it’s in this book. For sure, there’s something magnificent in the big players big teams, the big championships and the monstrously beautiful stadiums. But nothing ever moves me so much on planet football as the sight, from the air, of a pitch scratched out on some unsuitable earth. I saw one in Bosnia once, in the middle of the war. And in South Africa too, twenty years ago. Even, often, on some crappy scrap of ground in a rougher part of Glasgow, Hull, Clapham Common or wherever

The stories in this book of these countries’ attempts to make their way in the lower reaches of FIFA’s consciousness are movingly analogous [sp?] to all those pitches carved so determinedly into the ground.

And from David:

There are so many fascinating stories in this book that, as a football commentator might say, it is difficult to pick out the highlights. Perhaps the most significant phrase of all is one written almost in passing in Chapter 5, the fascinating account of football’s place in the life and history of those blasted islands, the Falklands. Describing the moment it dawns on the manager, Patrick Watts, that his ecstatic commentary is useless because he has lost his connection to Port Stanley where there has been a power cut, Steve Menary writes that “as the only journalist there,” he thought it would be only decent to lend Watts his tape recorder.

That phrase is clearly written not to boast of the extreme lengths travelled to produce this engaging, warm and human story of football in the outer reaches of the world. It was just a fact. Steve Menary has gone to the places other journalists have never reached, and returned to write his far-reaching book. No other journalists felt that the Island Games tournament in the Shetlands was one which need trouble their diaries, but in this book the most important stories are the ones flung far from the great clubs and nations which fill the back pages.