CHENNAI: The role of Goliath is one that the Indian football team seldom gets to play. More often than not, their part is that of the sling-wielding David, albeit with a lot less accuracy than the mythical king of Israel. But on Tuesday as they line up against the tiny island of Guam, Stephen Constantine and his boys will be the Goliaths, giants standing between David and an impossible story.
A comparison between the US territory of Guam and their visitors on Tuesday is inapposite, except on the football field. For perspective, the total population of Guam can be crammed into the Salt Lake Stadium, while its net worth is a lot less than that of the Indian Premier League. Their upset win over Turkmenistan last week, apart from being the first World Cup qualifier staged on the island, was also the first time tickets were sold for a football match there. Yet the smallest member of the Asian Football Confederation goes into a match with a country 6000 times its size with every chance of an upset victory. A lot of that is down to the man behind the touchline.
Before Gary White took over in 2012, Guam’s biggest football ambition was to limit the number of goals conceded to single digits. Their only previous attempt to qualify for the World Cup started with a 19-0 rout to Iran and ended with a 16-0 loss to Tajikistan in 2000, while North Korea put 21 goals past them in a 2005 encounter. Yet in just three years, the 40-year-old White has turned Asia’s weakest team into one that can dream about Asian Cup qualification and not be laughed at.
White was working with MLS outfit Seattle Sounders when an encounter with Guam Football Association president Richard Lai saw him take an unexpected career detour. “My club at the time asked me to meet with them to help them find a foreign coach for the national team. Richard Lai is able to motivate people more than anybody that I have ever met. I could see the desire in him when we met and it was so infectious. He invited me to Guam and I ended up visiting for a week. When I got there, I could see the work that he and the association had been doing there,” White says. The decision to stay, naturally, was not the hardest.
The biggest conundrum facing White was how to turn a team permanently locked in damage-control mode in to one that would give opponents something to be wary of. The answer, he decided, lay in the much-subdued culture of the native Chamorro people. It all started with a new nickname for the national team — the Matao.
“We had to give the players something to believe in bigger than themselves and instill in them the belief that they were fighting for their culture and heritage. The Matao was the chief of the Chamorro society back in the day, the highest position. The next thing we did was to introduce the Inifresi (a traditional chant). I wanted to have something like the All-Blacks chant that they do before the rugby games and the Inifresi was something that they chanted in the schools. It ended up bringing the players closer together,” he says. A passionate recital of the Inifresi is now a pre-game ritual for the Guamanian players, right from the junior level.
A philosophy to cater to long-term needs was in place. Now White needed a team for the immediate future. His search led him to the US, where a number of Guamanian-origin players were playing at various levels, including a couple (notably LA Galaxy star AJ DeLaGarza) in the MLS. Convincing them to turn down potential US caps to play for Guam was going to be hard. Not that White cared.
“I was not going to let them say no to me. My plan was very simple. I had to connect with the top players that were eligible for us. The first thing I had to do was to go out and meet them face to face. It’s very hard to say no to me when you are in front of me. I got support from the federation for a recruitment budget. We held player identification camps in areas where we knew there are many Guamanians. At the same time, we created a national academy back at home, where U-8, U-10, U-12 and U-14 teams trained with the national team staff,” he says.
The results have been stunning to say the least. But White is as preoccupied with the future as he is with the present. “I have a 10-year plan. We want to be the 5th strongest team in East Asia. The region has some very strong teams like Japan, South Korea and China and we want to make sure we are right behind them. Right now, we are not that far off from North Korea. So that is a realistic target and it is probably going to happen a lot sooner than 10 years.”