Paul’s decision to arrive back in the UK from his trip to Italy 12 hours before the biggest voyage of his personal and professional life proved a masterstroke. After all, all he had to do was get his Hep A booster, help plan the entire project, be taught how to use a camera, get over a ruthless case of diarrhoea and pack.
Meanwhile I had cleverly decided to leave the testing out of the £11,000 professional camera package to the last few hours in England; giving us just enough time to figure out that most of it didn’t work.
Paul, myself, Lizzie (our press officer) and Henry (A horny drifter from Cheltenham) decided that the best course of action was a nice farewell Indian take away. We discussed are last minute hopes and anxieties for the project. 18,000 miles and 36 hours is not very far to go for a heart-warming success but it is frightfully far to go to go get a javelin through the head.
There had been some worries that we were going to exceed our baggage allowance for the trip. We had assembled a fearsome arsenal of equipment. A vicious and ruthless footballing dirty bomb chocked full of shirts, boots, shinnies, shorts, socks whistles and balls ready to explode all over Pohnpei contaminating them with a terminal case of football fever. But, in order to bring the weight of our bag down we unpacked every single item and removed all packaging and labeling. 3 hours and 11 grams later we gave up and went to bed.
The story so far...
In December 2007, football journalist Paul Watson and filmmaker Matthew Conrad started to research the most remote footballing nations hoping to make a documentary on a land free from the increasingly materialistic world of the Premier League, a land where the love of the game still ruled.
Looking past the FIFA rankings to the list of non-federated teams, they found Pohnpei - the only side never to have won an international match.
Upon approaching the Pohnpei Soccer Association, Paul and Matt discovered that the former figurehead Charles Musana had just moved to London.
Mr Musana informed them that there was no coach in place and that the Pohnpei team had become more or less inactive.
Paul and Matt decided to give up everything to travel the length of the globe and take on the challenge.
20 months later, the football-crazed duo arrived on Pohnpei to take over the reigns. They had become the Soccermen.
Saturday 18 July 2009
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January 2008-May 2009
Once the vague idea had been formulated, it very rapidly became a definite plan. The only problem was that I had a job, a flat and an overdraft. Added to that I was in, at best, respectable physical condition and had no real idea how to coach a football team. In short, there was a lot of work to do before I could set off for Pohnpei.
So, I joined East Fulham, a decent amateur football club with regular training and an excellent coach. I doubled my gym visits and, most painfully, I started to watch what I ate and drank. Trips to the supermarket were miserable and agonisingly long, as for the first time in my life I read all the nutritional information labels.
Fairly unsurprisingly, the lifestyle of a serious athlete is quite different to that of a journalist. Working 15-hour shifts at home perched in front of my computer in a £700-per-month cell on Acton High Street, I struggled with the intensity of my new regime. I would run to the gym during shifts, do a session, run back and pray nobody had noticed my absence. It was a risky strategy and I'm sure the stress cost me years of my life.
I pretty much stopped drinking. I lost track of friends. I slept poorly and had regular nightmares that everything would fall through - what if someone else stole the idea and got there first? If I couldn't contact Charles Musana for a day I'd panic. Phone calls to Matt, who was in LA, had to be conducted at 8am while I was half-asleep and typing news stories for Football Italia with one hand. I turned up to football (four times a week) still exhausted from a 15k run the night before or a hurried afternoon assault on my biceps.
I was doing all this because of my love for football a tiny island I'd never been to, a speck in the Pacific Ocean, Pohnpei.
Posted by Paul Watson