It’s not quite on the FIFA scale…

…but there are lots of cheats in youth football.

Two of my favourite quotes are due to Pope John Paul II and Albert Camus. Albert, he said, “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”. JP2, he said, “Amongst all unimportant subjects, football is by far the most important.”

I remind myself of these whenever I come across cheating in youth football. It is quite common. I remember two teams in our division in Norway being penalised for fielding overage players, and that was in a league for 13-year-olds. One hopes the coaches involved would be embarrassed if confronted with it now, several years later. Was it that important to win (they didn’t anyway). On the other side of the world, in the league in Hanoi there have definitely been issues with players presenting pristine birth certificates, re-registered in a province other than their own. I noticed that all the boys involved were large and muscly.

Until now the international school sports scene has been squeaky clean, to my knowledge. Not even a whiff of suspicion. Indeed UNIS has consistently refused to field underage players that would have boosted the team. I agree: Rules is rules. If you’re born too early or too late, tough luck. The international schools tournaments of both MRISA and APAC have been pretty sporting on the pitch/court and very friendly off it. Then there was April’s girls’ football tournament in Beijing…

It was fun but the whole enterprise was somewhat tainted by the apparent cheating of a school who thought it was OK to field players from their sister school, 3 hours’ drive away. The cheating was obvious to us because the players in question (excellent of course, some picked for the national team) had already played in a friendly against UNIS for their own school. The school is according to their website “characterized by the Gospel ideals” and indeed maybe this generously inclusive team selection was part of the school’s drive “To lead an energetic fight against moral degeneration”. Anyway, it was a pity that the organisers didn’t just boot the team out, given that they knew of the situation before a ball was kicked. I did have faith that the APAC powers that be would use their wisdom after the event to enforce the obvious expectation that players in a school team should, you know, actually go to that school but I hear that no such action will be taken. Instead they are apparently going to introduce a rule saying that all the other rules must be followed. The mind boggles at the ingenuity of the solution. So anyway, I look forward to next year when UNIS Hanoi will be entering joint teams with UNIS New York, not forgetting to add a liberal sprinkling of Vietnamese national squad players.

Even if we accept Karol Józef Wojtyła’s dubious premise that some things in life are more important than football, I understand the frustration of players who travelled 4000 km to find themselves playing a bunch of rule-benders. Thank you to the organisers, the spectators, the coaches, the officials and to all the other teams, and may the Lord forgive anybody who cheated.

 

To Mai Châu, Hòa Bình for a swift break

Needing to decompress after an intense weekend coaching my team at a football tournament, I decamped on Sunday afternoon to Mai Châu. I just left straight from the pitches with hundreds of young footballers, the crazed coaches, the hoarse parents and a medal ceremony on to the dusty roads of industrial Hanoi to get out to the beautiful province of Hòa Bình. As ever, I spent the first hour of the trip questioning my own sanity, “this road is depressing, maybe I should turn back, I would have been at home by now…” and then you get out to the green bits with views, hardly any lorries and my mental state lifts. The open road, cruising at literally tens of kilometres per hour, trying not to obsess about what just happened on the football pitch. I would need to keep going solidly to get to the destination before dark. All going well under a grey sky and then after the Hòa Bình town bypass the road leads you up into the heavens, or thick cloud, as it is known. Visibility was perhaps two motorbike lengths. There wasn’t much traffic but I joined a sort of convoy of cars for a while before they shook me off. On the other side of the road, lorries squealed and wobbled past on their way down the mountain and you are struck by the dark thought that it is only convention keeping them on that side of the road and also, darker still, that if they hit you, you would end in a ravine. It was thrilling and forlornly smearing my glasses with a wet finger helped me stop thinking about the football for a few moments here and there. After this Ganzfeld for about half an hour, the merely miserable mist on the other side was like a summer holiday. OK, there were slippery, mud-strewn roads plus the odd pothole but at least you could see where you were going: Visibility really is under-rated. I made it to Mai Châu just as it was getting dark and rolled up to a well-kept house offering rooms. This was the view:

And here it is again, a beer, a shower and 15 minutes later

The next morning I rejected the Western breakfast offered to me (bread and banana pancakes) and insisted on beef noodles. A bird strutted about my breakfast table, apparently unaware that I fancied chicken noodles for dinner.

Then I went to find the back of beyond, 30 km up a mountain from Mai Châu. What do people do out here? Well, of course I still don’t really know but I took some pictures that give a little insight.

: 

It is a very calm place, not bustling, so it is easy to think that nothing is going on. Yes, nothing, apart from making clothes, practicing dance, collecting some sort of insect for drinking in alcohol, making trinkets, and the slow, muddy, never-ending, bent-back work in the rice fields. And they obviously send a lot of letters… three pint-sized post offices off the beaten track

and they play football, or at least have pitches and goalposts that make you stop complaining about the ones we use.

The trip back was in constant drizzle, so a lot better than the way there then because you could actually see your life flash in front of your eyes. And I got back in time for football training.