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.

Seven weeks to go… I think

Today marks seven weeks until the National Football (soccer) Team of Tonga, of which I am head coach, is supposedly leaving for our 2014 FIFA World Cup Qualifying matches in New Caledonia at this year’s South Pacific Games (SPG). At present the plan is to spend 10-14 days in Fiji prior to the tournament kicking off in New Caledonia on August 24^th and play a number of regional Fijian teams and other international sides who will be using Fiji as a training base before playing in New Caledonia.

Before training - still no training gear!

The team has been preparing for 13 weeks now and after coming through a fairly intense period of developing the side’s fitness we are now down to a final squad of 26 which will be trimmed to 20 for the qualifying tournament. I am incredibly happy with how the boys have transformed themselves into a team over the past three and a bit months and how the coaching staff (of which I have a Fijian assistant, an American strength and conditioning coach, three local assistants who we are grooming to take over national sides in the future and my Tongan Technical Director) have developed the boys’ technical and tactical ability over that time. Over 13 weeks we have gone from playing kick and rush football with no particular aim to keeping the ball on the deck and trying to play effective football. Needless to say I am incredibly proud of the way the boys have developed and they are a pleasure to coach. There are no egos in the squad, as you get at all levels in Australia, and the boys always give 100% in training and will try to comprehend what we ask of them and to put it into practice. I have even got the boys asking questions in training and requesting extra training, which for anyone who has worked in Tonga knows that Tongans asking for extra work of any sort is a rarity!

We recently had a FIFA official here in Tonga who was inspecting our facilities to ensure FIFA’s Goal Project money was spent properly; however the inspector had also been a national coach of New Zealand and has an intimate knowledge of Oceania football. On his final day here we played an ‘inter-club trial’ and the inspector said he was very impressed with the level of the boys’ play for a team from Tonga. A back-handed compliment if there ever was one, but a compliment none the less.

I say supposedly leaving, as while we have been preparing the squad for 13 weeks a spanner has recently been thrown into the works that mean our plans could change completely. As mentioned the first round of Oceania World Cup FIFA Qualifiers were to be part of the 2011 SPG in New Caledonia. However there are countries eligible to compete in the SPG that are not part of FIFA’s Oceania Football Confederation (OFC). One country, Guam (from FIFA’s Asian Football Confederation), had previously agreed not to compete in the football competition at the SPG as if they did play, FIFA would not recognise the SPG football tournament as World Cup Qualifiers for Oceania, as a team from Asia would be playing in the tournament. To put it into perspective it would be like Morocco or Brazil playing in the European World Cup Qualifying competition. Guam have now said they want to play in the football tournament - as is their legal entitlement with Guam being part of the South Pacific Games Council - however this now means the OFC will need to organise another tournament to act as the 2014 FIFA World Cup Qualifying competition for Oceania.

At the outset I saw this development as positive. With the SPG no longer being World Cup Qualifying, Tonga would have competitive warm-up matches in a serious tournament before World Cup Qualifying. However, I have since learnt the basic issue for football associations from countries in the region like Tonga is we cannot afford to participate in New Caledonia this September and then travel once more to another country in the region a few months later to play more games. With very little funding going into the game here in Tonga, apart from FIFA’s annual handout, it is an incredibly expensive project to send 20 players and four staff anywhere in the Pacific. From Tonga we can only fly directly to Fiji, New Zealand or Australia and once you add on connecting flights to a place like New Caledonia, then four weeks’ worth of accommodation, food, training and playing kits, medical and physiotherapy supplies the cost to send our team easily reaches six figures. Tonga simply cannot afford to spend up to one million Pa’anga (nearly 500,000 Australian Dollars) within three-six months to send one representative team to two competitions.

While nothing has been set in stone as yet, it appears 99% certain that Guam will exercise their legal right to play football at the SPG. So what does this mean for Tonga? From my perspective it is annoying. We have been preparing for 13 weeks on the basis that we would leave in seven weeks’ time and our preparation has been scheduled accordingly. Initial rumblings from OFC indicate a regional World Cup Qualifying tournament would now not be held until March, nine months away. This would basically mean the boys would have been training for 12 months without any competitive matches and would necessitate a change in schedule to ensure that while the boys stayed together as a group over the next five to six months, we would not train six days per week as is our current schedule. Ideally it would also mean we would play International Friendlies as a warm-up, however I can't be certain this would eventuate.

Bit of defensive shape work

If this does happen and Tonga will not be playing until March, 2012 and it also leaves my position in the air. As those of you who read this blog know, I am here as a volunteer and have found myself in the right place and the right time to be elevated to the position of national coach. My contract here is to finish on September 19^th (one week after I was scheduled to return from New Caledonia), so if I was to go home the Tonga Football Association (TFA) would need to then need to decide if they wanted me to stay on as their coach. Luckily for me, the TFA have indicated they want me as their National Coach and are willing to do what it takes to ensure I am in charge of the boys come March. However, monetarily they cannot afford any wages for me (which would will be modest at best, perhaps $500 Australian per week at the very highest end of the wage spectrum) for any longer than two months.

All things considered I would certainly put my hand up to come back a month earlier without pay to ensure the boys got a good 12 week intensive program in before the World Cup matches however that still means I would be home in Australia for four-five months before returning, what would I do? I have no idea, probably try and get a short term role in PR and in an ideal world I would be able to visit a few Australian clubs and potentially the AIS Football Academies to observe training and bring back those methods to the boys here to help them prepare for their Qualifiers. Maybe even follow in the footsteps of this man - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/13846140.stm. Don’t worry…. I know I’m dreaming!

Every Friday kids from all over Tonga come in for the national School's Competition - a few shots

Palangi United - The Volunteers' attempts at playing football here in Tonga

Men's team after 6-0 loss to National Champions... was only 1-0 at half time so not too bad!

Women's team after 4-2 loss to Popua... was an awesome effort to nab two goals, hopefully the blokes can do the same next week!

A Day in the Life of a Football Coach

This blog is dedicated to those who think that being a full-time football coach in Tonga, is in some way, shape or form a bit of a bludge. While I admit that, at times, in fact on many occasions over the past six months here in Tonga, I have had little to do apart from sit at Keleti Beach with a beer, read my book and go for a few swims, now that the Tongan Major League has finished preparation for the National Team’s 2014 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers at the South Pacific Games in August/September has stepped up. We have been training for three weeks now and the below is an example of a typical day which I will experience 4-5 times per week over the next four months as National Team Coach of Tonga.

The view from 'my spot' at Keleti

6:30am – Wake-up and get ready for the day. I usually wake up naturally at this time now due to the cacophony of farm-yard noises created by various roosters, pigs and dogs outside my window every morning. I have breakfast and a bucket shower - our indoor showers don’t work that well so instead, we fill up a bucket outside and throw it over our heads every morning much to the delight of our neighbours.

6:55am – After a five minute bike ride I arrive at the national gym to meet our Strength Coach ahead of the morning’s session.

7:00am – Group one arrives at the gym and warm-up (we currently have a squad of 32 players so divide the team into two groups for the hour long gym sessions). We dedicate two gym sessions per week to building strength and one/two sessions to core strength and agility.

9:15am – Group two finish their gym session and are transported back home in the Tonga Football Association (TFA) bus.

9:30am – After chatting with our Strength Coach and reviewing the morning’s session I usually spend 30-45 minutes in the gym doing/pretending to do my own work.

10:00am – It’s either off to Friends Café for Bombay Eggs or to Café Escape for breakfast and the luxury of air-conditioning. I use the internet here to respond to/delete the various banter emails I get from home (which can total 70+ in a day) and check the latest football news.

11:30am – Arrive at work after a 30 minute (11km) bike ride from Nuku ‘Alofa to the TFA. If it is raining or has just rained, this journey is a pain in the arse as I don’t have a mud guard on my one-gear bike and my back can be covered in mud (as it was this morning) when I arrive at work. While there are supposed to be 15 full-time workers at TFA I usually arrive to a near deserted office. Tongans are clearly not fans of work in general and we are lucky if the majority of employees turn up for more than an hour or two of work each day.

1:00pm – After a couple of hours mucking about on Facebook, email, Skype and SMH.com.au, I map out the coming week’s training sessions.

2:00pm – Sit down with my support coaches (I currently have three Tongan Assistants, including my “boss”, a Fijian Assistant, an American Strength Coach and a Swedish Physio…. Unfortunately the Swedish Physio is not a female) and explain the afternoon’s training session, their roles and the drills we will be running.

This can take some time as even if Tongans don’t understand something they will say they do anyway. It can usually take a verbal explanation accompanied with diagrams and giving a physical example out on the pitch for my Assistants to understand these drills. It does feel good however that the guys are learning and that I am building their capacity to run future training sessions by themselves. I would love to get to a point here in Tonga where I can allocate the training drills to different coaches and then ‘manage’ the session and only step in at key points… I doubt this can or will happen though.

2:45pm – Head outside into the consistently humid 25-30 degree heat to set-up the fields. I quite like this part of the day as it’s quiet and our fields are surrounded by palm trees so I find it relaxing to be wandering about my ‘office’ and when I compare my office to that of most of my friends and family back home, I realise, that for the next four-five months I am very lucky to be working in this environment.

The Office

3:15pm – Try and have a late lunch, chill out and muck about on the internet before training starts.

4:00pm – All the boys should have arrived if they have slight injuries now is the time to speak to our Swedish physio. It is much to the disappointment of the boys as well that the physio is not a Swedish female. This opinion was formed after our physio’s girlfriends, also Swedish, turned up at training last week.

4:15pm – Head out to the training fields, make sure all the boys have arrived and begin training. Training here is slightly different to anything that I have experience in the past as:

• Before and after each training session it is customary to pray.

• The boys, even the most experienced players, have never really been trained properly and each drill we do, even the most basic, is new to them. So it takes time to explain and give demonstrations of each drill and requires a bit of patience to wait for the boys to understand exactly what they should be doing before correcting technical aspects of their play.

• I don’t speak fluent Tongan but try to speak as much of it as possible. I feel I have learned the important words so far – leilei Oma (lay-lay oma) = sprint; ngaue malohi (na-u-he ma-lo-he) = work hard; fakacau’cau’ (Fa-ka-Cow-Cow – my favourite) = think; faka piko’piko (as spelt and another favourite) = lazy. I have learnt more football-specific words but those, especially the last two are my favourites.

6:15pm – As it does take a little bit of time to explain each drill and wait for translations we normally finish after close to 120 minutes. Being honest, the boys are technically not great but you would come to expect that from a bunch of amateurs who have never been trained before. However, they work incredibly hard, have a great team spirit and, most importantly, are doing their best.

6:30pm - After letting the boys cool down I usually summarise the training back in the office and take note of who has performed well and who has not. It is then my job to drive half the team back home. My job description really should be – National Team Coach/Bus Driver. Most of the boys don’t work let alone own cars so after making their way to training through a combination of running, hitch-hiking or jumping on one of the infrequent public buses, I make sure they get home as quickly as possible.

7:30-8:30pm-ish – Tonga is bigger than I expected. It takes ages to drop everyone home and I only cover half the island, my Fijian Assistant takes the boys who live out east back home and I cover the west and central parts of the island. I get home and if it’s Thursday or a Friday it is time for a beer or two and dinner in Nuku ‘Alofa and potentially some grinding at The Billfish, if not then hopefully one of my housemates has cooked dinner!

The Billy

As you can see days can be quite long; however this is balanced by the one or two days each week where we only have the afternoon session or the boys play an inter-team trial in the afternoon. On these days I generally sit at Keleti Beach with a beer, some of the freshest fish ‘n’ chips for lunch, snooze in the sun, read my book and swim in the balmy South Pacific until it is time to get back on the bike for a five minute ride back to work for training.

Not a bad way to spend a year!!

Keleti Beach

N.B. - Its Friday here which invariably means the internet is rubbish so I have only been able to upload two photos. I will try and upload more as the afternoon goes on.

Oh my... God

It has been an awesome Christmas and New Year's here in Tonga. I've had Tommy O'Hara, who perfected the art of doing nothing during his three weeks here, Dave Michael, who went through a truck-load of SPF +30 and Stevie Trik who could not keep still for longer than 10 minutes here in Tonga. During the time the boys were here we pretty much ate, drank, went for a daily swim and managed to fit in a couple of trips to Sunday Club Island.

Tommy

Dave

Stelio in the middle

We had a great Christmas Day as myself, Tom, David and my housemate Tomasi had a Bachelor's Christmas. Waking up at 11am after a few too many beers the night before we (except Tom of course) started preparing an afternoon feast consisting of tuna sashimi, pan fried tuna, roast vegetables, octopus, salad, wine, beers, rum, loads of chips and lollies and of course the PIG. At about 2pm we sat down on the balcony of 'The Palace', complete with an ocean view, and pretty much sat there drinking beers and eating food for the rest of the day, was a good way to spend my Tongan Christmas!

The pig being devoured

Christmas Drinks

I really appreciated the boys coming over here, it is easily the most expensive time of year to fly from Australia to Tonga and it was great to spend some time with three good mates from home. Hopefully one day I'll be in the position to visit them when they are living and working overseas.

The Pig

Now that the boys have gone I have started focusing all my efforts into getting the Tongan Under 17 team ready for their World Cup Qualifiers next week, which are supposed to start with a game against Tahiti on Sunday, 9th January.

I say supposed to be starting on the 9th as the Executive Committee of the Tongan Football Association have only just realised that the 9th, is a Sunday and they want us to forfeit the game against Tahiti. Sunday is a holy day here in Tonga, it is illegal for anyone to exercise, for shops to be open or to do anything at all really except to eat, sleep and go to church. There has also, apparently, been a precedent set as no Tongan national team has ever played on a Sunday. I think that is a load of rubbish and the Executive Committee are just making up excuses so people can't accuse them of being impious by allowing a bunch of teenagers to play a game of football on a Sunday.


While I can understand their stance if the game was supposed to be played here in Tonga, it's not. So it's not a legal issue, it's a 'moral' issue. It's an easy decision for a bunch of old Tongans to sit in a room and decide a team shouldn't play but the boys want to play, the other coaches (who are all Tongan) want them to play and all of the staff here (except one) want them to play.

The reality is, we will more than likely get slaughtered by Tahiti who have had over 12 months to prepare and have been playing in their national second division for a year. We've had five weeks and four friendly games against teams of varying skill and Tahiti will probably vie with New Zealand for the OFC's spot at the 2011 Under 17 World Cup. But it's not about winning, it's about the boys who have worked hard over the past five to six weeks being denied a chance to play in a FIFA World Cup Qualifying competition by a bunch of old men who think they know better. It is also about common sense, which is in short supply here in Tonga. What is the point of paying all the money to send a team to NZ and then just forfeiting the first game?


I met with a few members from the Committee today and tried to explain this to them. In as many words they said "we have no chance of winning anyway and it will be good for the boys to play the other three games regardless". It was not really the response I was looking for so I decided to try a different tact, I explained to them that if 'God' really is all powerful and has a hand in everything here on Earth then he must have had a hand in selecting all 18 boys in the squad, to which they agreed. I then said that 'God' must have played a hand in scheduling the match against Tahiti on Sunday so 'God' must have a good reason for wanting the boys to play that game on a Sunday.

Clutching at straws I know but they listened and will let me know of their decision at Midday tomorrow.