An International Man of Football Mystery - The Barbados Wanderer

"Old photographs and places I remember,
Just like a dying ember
That's burned into my soul"

Jim Capaldi (1981) - English drummer, singer and songwriter

Some good friends of mine at Colne Radio (keen soccer intellects and active campaigners Against Modern Football) take a very keen interest in football at its ‘grass roots’ level. So I thought it might be appropriate to start 2017 with my own small tribute to the world of Community Football; combined with a trip down Memory Lane. While it might be hard to believe now, back in the day, “when I wore a younger man's clothes”*, I was briefly an overseas player at a Premier League football club. Some readers will be aware already of this bizarre fact. Others may be incredulous. Let me explain …

Between 1993 – ’96, I was lucky enough to hold what some then regarded as ‘The Best Job in the World’**, when I was the Guinness Area Manager for the Southern Caribbean. I travelled widely around 'the islands' and down into South America. I learned to scuba dive (thanks, Colin Ferguson!) and sail Topper dinghies (thanks, Tony Hoad!) and occasionally to even do some business across 17 different and very individual national cultures. I was, I suppose, a sort of low-rent Ban Ki-moon (crossed with The Man from Del Monte) of the licensed brewing world; but that’s a whole OTHER story. Let me concentrate here on dusting off some failing football memories that "light the corners of my mind"*** - and on scrolling rapidly through the accompanying analogue photo albums of yore.

As an ex-pat, living in Barbados (all legal and above board, with a work permit, etc.) I was a paid-up member of a venerable old sporting institution; the famous Wanderers Club, of Bridgetown. In truth, Wanderers is a club arguably better-known for its cricketing prowess (it is the oldest cricket club in Barbados, founded in 1877 – and some critics with long memories still mention its historical ties to the Plantocracy of darker, Empire days) than for its football; but, at the time I lived on the island, it was one of the country’s elite football clubs, playing its domestic fixtures in Barbados's top flight. Although things don’t look so very correspondingly elite in this (slightly out-of-focus) team photo, below. It shows some of the 1996 squad, resplendent in their striped shirts, in the Barbados national colours. Included amongst this rogues’ gallery (wearing a mixed laundry bag of their own shorts and socks, as was customary) captured pre-match, in a goal area barely acquainted with the concept of grass, are: your intrepid reporter (extreme left); Steve Hillier (OHMSS, 3^rd from right) Grant Trebble (a key protagonist in the birth of this very blog – 2^nd from right), Harry (extreme right, with ball); Jonathan, Johnnie – and many more. For some of those pictured, and for a broad selection of other waifs, strays and ex-pats, Wanderers was as much a select, chilled, Friday night drinking spot (or “lime”) as it was a bona fide football club.

Mötley Crüe? “Blue and Yellow are the colours; football is the game; we’re all together and winning is our aim! So cheer us on through the sun...”

Now the treacherous clock of Old Father Time has wound itself forwards some 21 years; but I was lucky enough to spend a winter-sun holiday back in my old stomping ground, this Christmas. It would have seemed rude not to have dropped in on my ‘Alma Mater’, in Dayrells Road (just a few hundred yards from the world-famous Garrison Savannah) during my brief stay on the island; so that is exactly what I did. Three times, no less … “Ho, ho, ho!”

A day-night practice game in progress, at Dayrells Road.

Wanderers FC, alas, no longer play in the Barbados Premier League. Indeed, the football club is now, arguably, more famous for its “Veterans” elevens and its increasingly well-known, annual, international Masters festival, than for its more junior sides. I had hoped, for your delight and delectation, to attend and report on a Premier League game during my stay ‘on the rock’; but fate (and the new season’s January start) intervened to frustrate my best-laid plans (http://us.soccerway.com/national/barbados/premier-league/2017/regular-season/r37758/matches/).

Instead, I was forced to make do with attending a few of the club’s renowned(?) Friday and Wednesday evening kick-abouts – or “scrimmages”, as the locals would now have them termed. To participate in these, you must be prepared to play on a surface that is somewhat less even than a billiard table. You also need to be prepared to keep on running until well after daylight has fled the scene, along with all sense of Health and Safety. Your ultimate reward, however, might include a long, cold shower followed by a semi-naked Christmas Eve Skype call from London (taken in the changing room) with Steve “Ooh- Ahh” Hillier and Richard “Del-Boy” Stannard, already several hours ahead of you, at least in the drinking stakes; plus bare chats with the world famous triumvirate philosophy school of Grant, Gerry and Richard, setting the world to rights over too many Banks, Caribs and Absoluts, on the stoop of the Denis & Eric Atkinson Pavilion – as, indeed, was my reward. Followed by a late-night roti from Chefette.

"Go to Heaven for the climate; Hell for the company", said Mark Twain.
Was he wrong?

If the sound of participating in an international Veterans soccer tournament on one of the world’s best holiday islands has your football glands salivating, then you could do a lot worse than check out the official website of the event (http://www.bimff.biz/festival-overview) and enter a team this Summer. The tournament has grown into a mighty footballing Oak, from humble, yea, veritable acorn-like beginnings – or should that be a radiant Flamboyant tree, from a seed(y) pod? Anyway, you get the idea, I’m sure. It all began back when I was still resident in “Bim”, in “1995 with four local masters teams combining with Queen’s Park of Trinidad and Tobago … with Wanderers overcoming Queen’s Park 2-1 in the (inaugural) final”. What might whet your appetite just as much as the tournament’s glorious 22-year history of growth is the description of the action which followed the final whistle at that very first event: “… whereupon all teams and supporters retired to the bar, where several gallons of assorted liquors were consumed”. How shocking!

Grant, in tasteful orange hat, joint-organiser of the Barbados International Masters Football Festival, gets up close and personal with the (brewery) sponsors.

I have been assured that little has changed on the social scene (apart, perhaps, from the waist-lines of some participants) since those early days of the tournament. Wanderers’ key organisers continue to do some impressive heavy-lifting (see image above). They forge new ground each year, helping to keep the local economy afloat and Barbados firmly on the sports tourism map; supporting the local footballing community of the island. "Pride and Industry", indeed!

The Barbados Coat of Arms 

Meanwhile, in my absence, the wise grandees of Colne Radio saw fit to continue featuring The Football Pharaoh's treasured reflections on The Beautiful Game. Listen in (from c.34 minutes) to Episode 10 of Bill & Bryn's Christmas "Extra Time". You know, there'll soon be just no escaping me:

https://www.mixcloud.com/brynandbill/new-bryn-bills-extra-time-episode-10-with-neil-kellybryn-and-desser-and-very-christmas-music/

Meanwhile (Part 2): what goes around comes around; and Grant has insisted that I add the following photo of me in all of what he calls my "glory". He may need a new dictionary. Luckily, his 'phone had a wide-angle lens.

Shirts or Skins?

Culture-Vulture References goes back to the '70's:

*Billy Joel's “Piano Man” (1973)
** Including listeners to a BBC Radio 5 Live 'phone-in show
*** Alan & Marilyn Bergman and Marvin Hamlisch's "The Way We Were" (1974)