Shaka Hislop
The Times
June 09, 2006
Fairytale of three little boys might just turn out to have surprise ending
By Shaka Hislop
THIS must be a dream, right? Surely I’m going to wake up tomorrow and find that Trinidad & Tobago are not really in the World Cup finals. Because it doesn’t make sense. It defies all logic. But that’s the thing about dreams. And sometimes, just sometimes, they come true.
When it comes to telling our story, there are a thousand different places I could begin, but maybe I should just start at the very beginning and take you back 25 years or so with a story about three kids playing football in a park in Trinidad. One’s called Dwight, one’s called Russell and one’s called Neil, but you probably know him as Shaka. There’s also a talented kid called Brian Lara, who’s pretty good with a cricket bat, too. I wonder what became of him.
Anyway, we’re playing football. One of us is Zico. One of us is Sócrates. One of us is Diego Maradona, that kind of thing. And occasionally we revert to our real names and we dare to dream that we’re the ones playing in the World Cup.
Last November, when we beat Bahrain in a play-off, that dream became a reality. I was on the bench for that game, but just try telling me I wasn’t a part of it. When the final whistle blew, I ran over to Kelvin Jack — it’s that goalkeepers’ union thing — and we had a big hug. Then I ran over to Dwight Yorke, who was in tears, and Russell Latapy. And I thought of the three of us growing up together and how we had helped our country to reach the World Cup for the first time. And that’s when my emotions got the better of me.
I still can’t believe we’re here in Germany, three kids who played under-10s football together on a little Caribbean island where we always thought of the World Cup as something that happened on another planet. But we know it’s real because we’ve got our Fifa ID cards hanging round our necks, there’s a bus waiting outside the hotel to take us to Dortmund this morning and, most obviously, because we’re being worked extremely hard by our coach, Leo Beenhakker.
For me, at 37, it’s almost surreal. If you’d asked me last summer, I would have told you I would be retired by now. Every ounce of my intellect was telling me that. If you ask my team-mates, they’ll tell you I’ve retired more times than I’ve played for Trinidad — that’s a bit of a running joke in the camp — but I could never truly give it up. Whatever I achieved in my club career, I always felt there was something missing because I hadn’t been to the World Cup with Trinidad.
Now, incredibly, it’s a reality, but we have to try to keep the fairytale going. When we met up five weeks ago, Mr Beenhakker said the hard work started here. He wasn’t joking. You probably think of the Trinidad & Tobago camp as being very relaxed. Well, we’ve been training twice a day, very intensively at times, to prepare us for the task ahead. If we don’t progress to the last 16, it won’t be for a lack of preparation.
Of course it’s still laid-back in some respects. We’re West Indian and that’s our culture. Mr Beenhakker has brought a real European-style professionalism to our game, but it’s a case of mixing the two cultures and creating a successful blend. We’re relaxed, we’re laid-back — except when we’re playing table football or table tennis — but we know the rules about dress code and punctuality and we’re all tucked up in our beds by 11pm ready for lights-out. Even Dwight.
When you get to the World Cup, it’s all about making an impression — not just in the tournament but in the hearts and minds of the people back home. My wife’s cousin told me she was crossing a bridge in the south of Trinidad recently and three little kids ran past with a football, saying “I’m gonna be Dwight”, “I’m gonna be Russell” and “I’m gonna be Shaka”. That told me that, in one sense, we’ve already succeeded. But Mr Beenhakker won’t let us settle for that.
