Visa Run - Pattaya to Sihanoukville (16 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Just around the corner from the bar-strip was a small restaurant run by a young Cambodian couple. The owner’s name was Samlain, which he told me meant ‘friend’. Samlain was a very good looking young man with flashing dark eyes and an engaging smile; at first I was rather wary of him because he seemed just a bit too much of a nice guy to be true. Samlain’s English was very good and he was quick to impress his customers—including myself—with his sharp wit and helpfulness. Ever the cynic, I wondered exactly what he was after and waited for the sting to come. I was mistaken. After I had been in Sihanoukville for a week, I realised that the amiability of the handsome young man was completely genuine.

It was very rare to see Samlain’s wife in the restaurant because the food she cooked was tasty and cheap and she spent nearly all her time out in the kitchen preparing meals. The little restaurant was named after a kind of flower that grows around Angkor Wat. It was very popular indeed, because as well as the tasty dishes, Samlain’s outgoing nature, sense of humour and willingness to share his knowledge of his hometown always brought the customers back for more. Samlain’s personality brought the punters into the eatery and his wife fed them.

Samlain was delighted when I told him I was from England because his overwhelming passion in life was football, and in particular the English Premier league. He clearly loved the game and there was reverence in his eyes when he spoke about the great players of the past like George Best, the Charlton Brothers, Jimmy Greaves and Gary Lineker. We argued over who was the best player of all time and Samlain was dismayed when I said I certainly thought Diego Maradona was in the running. He admitted the stocky little Argentinian’s skills were beyond measure, but said he could never forgive him for the famous ‘hand of god’ experience that had put England out of the World Cup in 1986.

Samlain and all his many pals supported the big boys—Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool—because having been born in Cambodia they had no real association or ties with the less affluent and therefore less succesful teams. When I told Samlain I was a West Ham man due to a sad accident of birth he patted my shoulder in sympathy and looked genuinely sorry for me.

Samlain’s knowledge of football and the history of the game far surpassed my own. The young fanatic was a mine of information about past stastistics, players and results and he seemed to know more about the records of yesteryear than the late, great commentator Brian Moore had done. Samlain also captained a team called the Golden Lions in the local soccer league and I could see he was deadly serious about his sport when he told me the team trained every afternoon without fail, and how anyone who didn’t turn up would be dropped immediately.

It seemed that the Golden Lions were top of their division and on Sunday they had an important game against the Blue Sharks which they really needed to win to stay there. I was delighted when Samlain asked me if I would like to come along and watch. He said if I turned up at his restaurant at two o’clock on match day he would make sure I got a ride down to the stadium with the team in the manager’s car.

A couple of days before the match I walked past Samlain’s restaurant. The captain and six other members of the football team were sitting outside at a table. One of the lads’s wives was in a clinic downtown having a baby and they were already celebrating the birth—even though the poor girl was still in labour. They were all sharing a large barracuda which they ate with chopsticks and that the father-to-be had brought along and they were drinking tiny glasses of a dark-coloured alcohol that they replenished from a large jug filled with the stuff. Samlain asked me to join them and I thought it might be a good chance to flash Ron’s photograph around, so I pulled up a chair and sat down. They all studied the snap and three of the lads recognised the old sailor at once, but as usual nobody had a clue who Psorng-Preng was.

Whilst I was sitting there talking to the boys I saw a shape move under the house next door which stood on stilts that were about two feet high. At first, I thought I was looking at nothing more than a bunch of rags moving in the wind, but I jumped back in shock when the most mishapen dwarf I have ever seen in my life emerged from under the house and ran quickly across the road into the shadows opposite. I had seen plenty of people with deformities around Asia before, but this unfortunate human being was in a class of his own. The tiny hunchback stood no more than three feet tall and his long, muscular arms were disproportionately large for his stunted body. He held a small, dirty sack in one big hand. The poor cripple looked around for a few seconds then scuttled across the dark track so quickly I could barely believe what I had seen.

Samlain was slightly drunk and he began to tell me how virtually all sport in Cambodia was gambled on and how this could sometimes affect the results in a negative way.

“Corruption in sport here is a terrible thing,” he continued angrily, but I noticed one of the other boys dig a sharp elbow into his ribs and I guessed Samlain thought he had said enough because he changed the subject at once, and wouldn’t talk about it any more.

“Are you still coming on Sunday?” he asked me, his usual grin taking the place of his serious face in an instant.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I assured him, and the rest of the night was spent predicting how his friend’s new baby son would certainly be playing for Manchester United or Liverpool before he was eighteen. I hoped to God the poor girl in the clinic managed to produce a boy. For these football crazy Cambodian lads, it seemed the idea of a daughter was unthinkable.

Super Sunday. The day of the big Match dawned, and two thirty p.m. found me travelling to the stadium in the manager’s car with Samlain, two defenders and the goalkeeper. The manager was a softly-spoken gentleman around my age and it was obvious the players all loved him. Apparently, he sponsored the team and paid for the kit, the half-time drinks and any other expenses incurred all out of his own pocket. Samlain told me the tallest of the boys in the car was the best player in the team, but unfortunately he was a little too fond of the booze and smoked too much weed and had only just started playing again after several months on the sauce. In contrast to the lanky six foot right-back, the goalkeeper was the smallest man on the team and Samlain apologised to me for his height.

“I’m sorry he is so small,” he said, looking a trifle embarrased by his keeper’s small stature, “but he is really very good.”

The stadium was in the International Life School, which Samlain told me was one of the three proper football pitches in Sihanoukville. It was around the standard of a Dr. Martens league stadium in England, but there the similarity ended. Behind the goal at one end of the field the pylons of the Weather Station and the golden spires of Wat Leu towered over the pitch, and along the far side was a row of stands that nestled under the high university buildings. At the other end of the pitch there were tumbledown wooden stalls selling drinks and refreshments. The pitch itself was awful. It was sun-baked, hard and bumpy and looked extremely dangerous. Anyone attempting a sliding tackle across the touchline was going to lose all the skin off his legs or worse, because the playing area was bordered by broken bricks and stones on all sides. I had the feeling I would be seeing a few injuries that afternoon and I wasn’t wrong.

There were two games arranged at the International Life School that Sunday and I was surprised to see around a thousand people had turned up to watch them. The crowd was surprisingly noisy and a high percentage of them seemed happily drunk. A gang of little boys had comandeered blown-up condoms on sticks as balloons and were running around the touchline screaming, their bizarre toys blowing in the breeze behind them. When we arrived the first match had twenty minutes still to play, so we sat by the touchline and watched the remainder of the game. The Golden Lions boys hadn’t kitted up yet and they were all sitting around shirtless in the sun. Every one of them looked like a fit athlete and not one of them had an ounce of surplus fat on his body. Samlain was the oldest player in the team at twenty-seven, and the average age was around twenty. A couple of the boys looked very young, indeed. The tough little goalkeeper was the joker of the team and wore two different coloured boots on his feet.

After the first game had been in progress for one hundred minutes the waiting Golden Lions’ lads started to complain bitterly at the extra time that was being played. Apparently, some high roller had put a big bet on the Reds putting more than twelve goals past the Blues. Earlier on in the season, Samlain’s team had put a dozen strikes past the hapless keeper of the Blue team and somebody had obviously thought this could be bettered. In the one hundred and tenth minute it was still eleven-nil, but the referee—who Samlain said was in on it—was finally forced to blow his whistle for full time. This was mainly because the guys on the Red’s bench and their supporters were beginning to shout things at him that had nothing to do with football and the mood was threatening to turn ugly. Later on in the afternoon I got the feeling there might have been quite a bit of gambling going on that day.

The match between the Golden Lions and the Blue Sharks was a hard-fought, near punch-up of a game. These boys played in earnest, and both teams really wanted to win. Our lads were wearing expensive looking golden shirts, whereas for some strange reason only known to themselves the Blue Sharks were kitted out in red. As the game progressed, I began to think the colour of the kit might have been chosen so it wouldn’t show the blood. There were three incidents where punches were exchanged but the referee chose to ignore them; although he did give out six yellow cards for tackles that might have got the perpetrators arrested for grievous bodily harm back in England. There was also a lot of dangerously high-kicking and one lad collected a broken nose. During the match two players from each team had to be substituted due to leg injuries; one looked very nasty indeed. It was plain these Cambodian boys played hard. At half-time there was still no score and I went around to the food stalls behind the goal and ate a bowl of soup with rice and chicken in it. The woman who sold it to me told me it was called
bawbaw
.

All through the match the opposing benches hurled insults at each other across the pitch and it didn’t sound to me as if they were joking, either. The best player on the park was the Blue Shark’s number eight—a heavily muscled lad who was really built far too big for football and looked more like a rugby man. His calf muscles were so large he had to roll his socks down because they wouldn’t pull over them. This meant he was a brave lad because he had to play without shin-pads. He wasn’t a particularly skilfull player but he was one hard guy and it was obvious his commanding presence held the Blue Sharks together. He was the type of guy who wouldn’t have pulled out of a fifty-fifty ball even if sandwiched between Vinny Jones and Duncan Ferguson. Although he was rather clumsy on the ball, due to his fierce determination it usually ended up where he wanted it to go. Many tackles he went crashing into left someone laying on the ground. If the Golden Lions could had taken him out of the game the Blue Sharks team would have fallen to pieces. Our number seven and Samlain himself were also pretty good, but I gathered the Golden Lions were having an off day. Maybe there was too much depending on the outcome.

The Blue Sharks scored a goal just after half-time when the Golden Lions’ goalkeeper came sprinting off his line in a one-on-one race for the ball with the Sharks’ centre forward. Unfortunately, a small dog had wandered onto the pitch and the little goalie fell over the rogue mongrel and went sprawling and the ball trickled into the net. Despite the strange circumstances the referee gave the goal. The Blue Sharks’ supporters, bench and players celebrated like they had won the World Cup and I got the feeling there was a lot more at stake that afternoon than just a game of football.

In the last fifteen minutes of the match, the Sharks’ big number eight was knackered due to the heat and carrying the tiring weight of all that muscle around, and he all but dropped out of the game. The Golden Lions took advantage of his exhaustion to press forward relentlessly in their quest for an equaliser and hit the bar once and the post twice. They could have scored five, but they were unlucky and the game ended one-nil to the Blue Sharks.

The Golden Lions’ boys had given it their best and they were devastated. I was surprised to see a couple of the players were actually in tears. The coach of the Blue Sharks came over to shake our manager’s hand and I couldn’t help noticing a great roll of cash with an elastic band around it change hands quickly. At the end of the game all our players stripped off their kit and the manager put it all into the boot of his car, then we drove home in silence. When we were making our way to the stadium earlier in the day it had been decided that we would all go up to Blue Mountain for a beer after the game but now nobody was in the mood.

Back at Samlain’s restaurant I bid the players goodbye and thanked them all for a memorable afternoon. I shook Samlain’s hand and commiserated with him.

“I’m sorry you didn’t win, but I really enjoyed myself,” I told him, trying to be diplomatic.

Samlain was still pretty choked up but he answered with some dignity.

“Win or lose, that’s football,” he said.

The manager was also plainly very upset but tried hard not to show it. Before I left he asked me what I had thought of his team. He seemed genuinly interested in the opinion of a bloke from football’s home country, so I answered him truthfully. I said I thought his lads had given everything they had got and had deserved a draw at least, and if it wasn’t for that bull of a number eight they would have won easily.