‘Military made me,’ says Edwards.
By: Scott Wilson (The Northern Echo).
England travel to the Caribbean on Sunday to take on a Trinidad & Tobago line-up containing Sunderland duo Carlos Edwards and Kenwyne Jones.
Chief Sports Writer Scott Wilson visited Trinidad & Tobago himself this month to investigate the pair's background.
Today, he looks at Edwards' upbringing and the part played by his larger-than-life teacher.
ST ANTHONY'S College, in Westmoorings, a small town in the North-West of Trinidad, does not look like a breeding ground for Premier League footballers.
Drive in along the dusty highway that leads from the island's capital, Port of Spain, and while the 50m outdoor swimming pool that overlooks the entrance gates hints at a learning experience that acknowledges the importance of sport, the solitary football pitch with its uneven playing surface and unstable goalposts is a million miles away from the state-of-the-art Academies that have been established in England to develop a future generation of players for the professional game.
Similarly, Nigel Grosvenor, the college's jovial PE teacher, hardly fits the stereotype of the fit and focused football coach.
He is a larger than life character in more ways than one and, in the morning that we spent together earlier this month, spent more time admonishing his students for not having their shirts tucked in than for their failure to control a football.
Yet, together, Grosvenor and the school that employs him has been integral to the development and success of not one, but two Premier League footballers. And even more remarkably, both players have ended up travelling halfway around the world to play alongside each other in Sunderland's starting XI.
Today, Carlos Edwards and Kenwyne Jones are revered as national treasures in their native Trinidad & Tobago, and hailed as heroes on the banks of the River Wear. Had it not been for Grosvenor, though - a man Edwards describes as "his second father" and who was the subject of a spontaneous round of applause during Jones' wedding speech - they would almost certainly never have made it out of their homeland.
Roy Keane and Niall Quinn are rightly acknowledged as the architects of Sunderland's latest footballing revolution, but Grosvenor deserves to be recognised as the man who put two of the most important building blocks in place.
"If you're a halfway decent coach, you don't find a footballer, they find you," said the Trinbagonian, in a St Anthony's staff room boasting pictures of both Edwards and Jones lifting Inter-College Championship trophies during their time at the school.
"But the challenge is what you do next. There are so many things that can go wrong in a young man's life, so many roads they can take that are the wrong ones. Your job is to steer them in the right direction and try to improve their football along the way. The biggest thing with Carlos and Kenwyne was that they always wanted to listen and learn."
As the elder of the pair by six years, Edwards was the first to arrive at St Anthony's in 1989.
Born in Patna Village, a tiny rural enclave on the outskirts of the slightly-less-tiny village of Diego Martin, the youngest of six brothers and sisters already had the makings of a talented footballer thanks to the hours he had spent on the small plot of cultivated land adjacent to his family home. Yet, even at that stage, the course of his development was anything but smooth.
"Carlos was a really great kid," said Grosvenor. "He was friendly, polite and always did his work on time. It was easy to see that he had something on the football pitch, but it was difficult to get him to play games for us.
"He'd had a very sheltered upbringing in Patna, and his father was a very religious man. He didn't mind Carlos playing football, but he forbade him from playing on a Saturday because that was the holy day.
"Carlos didn't want to upset his father and, for a while, he played for us during the week and stayed at home on the weekends. But as we progressed through various competitions in the later years of school, all of the big games were on a Saturday.
"There are two or three occasions where I can remember driving to Carlos' home and, as his mother distracted his father in one room, I would smuggle Carlos out in the other direction. I'm sure his father knew what was going on, but I think he played along with it because he could see how successful his son was starting to become."
That success manifested itself in the final of the 1997 Inter- College Championship, the most prestigious junior football tournament in Trinidad & Tobago, when Edwards scored the winning goal to provide St Anthony's with their first major trophy.
After graduating from school the following summer, Edwards combined a footballing career with Queen's Park, a semiprofessional side in the north of Trinidad, with a labouring job in Patna. But despite no longer having any formal control over his protege, Grosvenor's mentoring role was far from complete.
"I watched Carlos in the year or so after he finished school, and although he never changed as a person, the direction in which his life was going changed," he said. "He was hanging around with what I guess you could call the wrong crowd.
"There are a lot of problems in the towns around Port of Spain - guns, gangs, marijuana and other drugs - and Carlos was around people who were heavily into their liming (a peculiarly Trinbagonian form of socialising that tends to involve copious amounts of rum and a lax attitude to the rules and regulations of the working day).
"I met Carlos and said, I don't like what's happening to you. If you are serious about your football, you need to join the Defence Force (the Trinbagonian army) and get your life back on track'.
"He was reluctant at first, but I said, Well if you carry on as you are, you and me are finished'. A month or so later, he visited my house to tell me he had been accepted into the army."
Closeted away in the armed forces, Edwards rediscovered both his faith and his focus. He starred for Defence Force in the embryonic Trinidad & Tobago National Football League and began to earn rave reviews from a series of British scouts who viewed the Caribbean as a largely untapped footballing market.
Most importantly of all, however, the army also made Edwards reassess his ambitions and targets away from the field of play.
"I don't like to think about what might have happened if I hadn't joined the army," said the midfielder. "It was a massively important time in my life and it helped me become the person I am today.
"I was in the army for a couple of years and it's an experience I've been able to call upon ever since. I'm a military man. It turned me into an independent person and made me strong mentally as well as physically. The army shaped me and it's still in me even today."
Yet for all that Edwards' military career was blossoming, it was his footballing ability that was increasingly making heads turn. Former Wales defender Joey Jones arranged to take Edwards and two other Trinidadians - Dennis Lawrence and Hector Sam - on a three-week trial at Wrexham. By its completion, all three had been signed up.
"I can distinctly remember the first time I saw all three play," said Cledwyn Ashford, a scout with both Wrexham and Everton. "They could all play football but, even at that stage, Carlos stood out a mile. He just seemed to glide across the surface. Nobody could catch him, and we knew we had a player on our hands straight away."
Edwards went on to make 180 appearances for Wrexham before joining Luton Town in 2005. Eighteen months later, and he was helping Sunderland lift the Championship title after making a £1.4m move to the Stadium of Light.
He remains one of St Anthony's most celebrated former students, but is far from the only player to have been trained at the college.
In the same year that Edwards was graduating, an 11- year-old Jones was coming through the doors for the first time. Thanks in no small part to Grosvenor's input, their paths would cross again at Sunderland some 12 years later.
SUNDERLAND: THE CARIBBEAN CONNECTIION
Today's article is the first of a three-part series from Trinidad & Tobago.
Tomorrow, Scott Wilson charts Kenwyne Jones' progress from St Anthony's student to Premier League professional. On Saturday, he looks at how Sunderland are helping transform Trinidad & Tobago from a nation of cricket lovers to a footballing force.
