Some clarity and a pig or two

The dates are in, the decisions have been made by the OFC top brass and we now have a goal to aim for. As I mentioned in my previous blog Tonga will no longer be competing at year’s South Pacific Games in New Caledonia as the football competition will not be recognised by FIFA as official Oceania regional World Cup Qualifiers due to Guam’s participation. Instead, the “bottom four countries” in the region – Tonga, Western Samoa, American Samoa and Cook Islands, will play in a preliminary qualifying competition from November 21^st to November 28^th in American Samoa and Samoa. What has since made this decision even more unpalatable is that is appears Tonga is the only team now not competing at the South Pacific Games. So our “bottom four” competitors will have had the benefit of four to five tough matches before we play them in November.

This decision was made on Thursday of last week and rumour quickly spread to my team before I was able to communicate the decision myself. As such when the boys arrived for our monthly fitness testing the atmosphere can only be described as despondent. The boys were upset. They had been training, hard, very hard, over the course of 13 weeks and had committed to up to six days per week. This I had been told was the most committed a Tongan Men’s National Team had ever been and the boys had not only gave up their time (remember these are all amateur players) but had to spend what little money they had each week on bus fares to training each day. Out of a squad of 26 players three have jobs and two are still at school, so this was a massive commitment for the boys and I can understand why they were so upset. They had been promised a chance to play the region’s best, to represent their country at the region’s most prestigious event and the light at the end of the tunnel had been blacked out.

When I arrived at training the boys were sitting, huddled mumbling to each other. I instantly realised they knew something was up as I was usually greeted to training by a chorus of laughter as the boys would start their own games of ‘head-tennis’, pig in the middle or would be practicing dribbling/shooting techniques. I was very proud of this as it represented a shift in culture, teams of the past usually waited until training started at 4pm before even touching a football and the fact my boys were voluntarily kicking a football round at 330pm each day proved their commitment to the cause. I sat down with the lads and they all looked at me and conversation stopped until one of the senior lads told me, “We’ve heard we are not going to New Caledonia anymore. We don’t want to train anymore and some of the boys want to quit. We want a meeting with you and Lui Aho (TFA’s CEO)”.

Tents at The Church Conference Feast

I essentially had a group of players that after training so hard and improving to a level where we could have been competitive at any regional competition were willing to pack it all in, and I couldn’t blame them. They had been told previously that we would go to New Zealand, then Fiji, then Fiji and New Zealand before travelling to New Caledonia, and now we were going nowhere. There are not many teams round the world that would train for 13 weeks without playing a competitive game or going on tour and the fact we had been able to keep the boys’ commitment at such a high level is testament to the coaching staff. I spent the next 30 minutes explaining to the boys in a variety of broken Tongan and English what the situation was (why we weren’t going to New Caledonia), what would happen now ( we would travel to the Samoas in November) and what I personally thought of the situation and why I believed the boys should carry on training. I then offered the boys a few alternatives for training ranging from carrying on as we were for a couple of weeks before a larger rest period and to taking a break now and resuming light training the following week. I didn’t want to stand there and tell the boys what they had to do, I wanted them to take ownership of the situation and come together as a team to make a decision. I told them that whatever decision they came to I would support them but not to throw away what we had achieved in the past 13 weeks.

I left the boys to it and went to clear our field of the markers I had set out for training while watching intermittently as the boys raised their hands to vote on various ideas. Eventually they came to an agreement and decided, as a team that they wanted to keep on training after a short rest period of five days (one of the options I gave to them). I said we would train three times per week until the start of August and pick up then pick up the pace once more. Having gone from threatening to quit the boys had made a collective decision to commit to football and to commit to a further five months of hard work. I was incredibly proud of the boys as anyone who has worked or lived here will tell you Tongans will generally take the easy way out, they will take the easy road rather than commit to hard work and usually in group situations decisions are made based on what the ‘elder’ of the group wants, rather than consensus. The fact that my boys took a vote and that each lad ranging in age from 17 to 39 had a say in a collective decision is amazing. The boys had committed to hard work over five months by coming to a collective consensus, this doesn’t happen regularly in Tonga!

To celebrate, all the boys invited me to a feast the following day (Friday of last week). The feast was part of the Wesleyan Church’s ‘Conference Week’, which from what I could gather, consisted of people eating as much food as possible for ten days. If there is one thing Tongans can do well, it is feast! When I arrived at the feast, which was held in a field behind a church in central Nuku’Alofa, I have never seen so much food in all my life. Tables were 20m long and there were at least 50 tables in this field. Each table was covered in food, multiple layers high. To put this into perspective, I sat on the corner of one of these tables and in front of me was: a pig, lobsters, crabs, lamb, roast chicken, fried fish, oysters, root vegetables, mussels, potato salads, crab salads, fried rice, bacon & egg pies (my personal favourite), omelettes, sausages and a fruit platter. Now that was only one corner of one table and I’d say each table had five to six of everything I mention above! It was just huge. Not only does this happen every day for ten days but it happens four times each day at 7am, 1pm, 5pm and 10pm!!

The Feast

I later learnt the downside to this feast, the church (without doubt the richest institution in Tonga) does not actually organise any food itself. Instead it asks mostly poverty stricken Tongans to prepare one or two of these feasts for the week. Each village takes it in turn to prepare a feast and it can cost Tongans months of savings to simply supply food for the church. As one of my boys said, “Tongans are not rich, I don’t know how we do it but we are always rich and rich in food for the conference”. Make up your own mind but I think it is a disgrace.

The Food

The Queen - people would approach the table with gifts of.... tinned beef

So where do I go from here? As frustrating as it has been and as much as my enthusiasm has waned somewhat, I now see this break as an opportunity rather than a hindrance. I am heading to Samoa for a three day coaching seminar with the coaches of Samoa, American Samoa and the Cook Islands on July 20^th and will then return to Australia for seven and a half weeks following that course. Since the decision not to travel to New Caledonia has been taken I emailed an Australian based FIFA Coaching Instructor asking if there was any way he could assist me in finding elite training sessions that I could attend in Australia. To my surprise (I had sent these types of emails before, in fact in 2006 I sent an email to 100 professional clubs in the UK and received three responses, one positive from Motherwell FC where I attended training sessions for three weeks) I received an email a few days later from one of the most senior figures within the Football Australia (FFA) saying yes, the FFA would definitely help you and can look to organise training sessions at the AIS and A-League clubs for you to attend.

Needless to say this is an amazing opportunity for me to learn from some of the best in Australia and I can’t wait to get along to these sessions and bring back what I learn with me to Tonga.