When Stephen Constantine became coach of the Nepal national team, he didn’t realize he would become a national hero

REMOTE NATION SEEKS ENGLISH COACH FOR UNLIKELY TRIUMPH

Interview: Matt Walker

This is the kind of story British films used to tell. It’s the story of an unlikely hero, an Englishman who travels to a remote and inaccessible country on the other side of the world, where he takes charge of a ragbag assortment of individuals and transforms them, if not into superheroes then at least into a proud team of men who, against all the odds, exceed their own wildest expectations. Not only that, he then gets named in the birthday honors list of the country’s monarch.

This is the story of how a 38-year-old Englishman called Stephen Constantine became the football hero of Nepal, by taking them to the final of the 1999 South Asian Federation games. We know it doesn’t sound like much, but in a country so poor it makes most of its money from mountaineering ( the Nepali government sells peak permits, without which climbers are not allowed to scale its highest summits, notably Everest), that’s as good as reaching the World Cup finals.

Constantine was born in central London, the child of an English mother and Cypriot father. Like so many other boys he dreamed of being a professional didn’t make it in the UK, though he played in both Cyprus and the US as a central defender before a cruciate ligament injury ended his career at 28.

Constantine then took up coaching amassing a worthy collection of Fifa and FA badges, certificates and licenses. There were no glamour jobs - just a coaching job with Long Island Rough Riders, an MLS feeder team. But the suits at Lancaster Gate know who he was, so when they heard in January 1999 about a country in Asia looking for an English head coach, they put in a call to Constantine.

The All- Nepali Football Association (ANFA) were in no hurry. But when they finally called Constantine in June 1999, they were desperate - the SAF Games were due to start on 31 July, just seven weeks later. They needed their man now.

Nepal had won just two matches in five years when Constantine arrived in the capital, Kathmandu. It was easy to see why. “There was a rabble of 35 players training on a field with a terrible pitch and no nets in the goals, ‘ recall Constantine. ‘And each of the 35 players was wearing different colored shirts and socks. There was no physic or doctor, the diet of the players was rice and dhal (lentils) three times a day. There was no organization, no planning. It was like Hackney Marshes - but this was the national team. I couldn’t believe it.' The team hadn’t been helped by the fact that no-one had ever cared about them before. In the previous 18 months they had been coached, variously, by a German, a Korean, a Japanese and an Uzbek. They’d all been washouts. So Nepal needed a man who could be part transforming visionary, part tactical genius, part fitness guru, part organizational mastermind, and who world stick around. Oh, and get the team ready for a tournament in under two months.

Chaos wasn’t the only problem. Nepal is a largely Buddhist country and its people are famously good-natured. So the football wasn’t exactly competitive and Constantine soon recognized his players were’a passibe lot’ (Nepal’s Theravada strain of Buddhism decrees that one should refrain room open displays of anger towards others, disturbing or harming the earth - including grass - and stepping in puddles. Don’t expect Dennis Wise to end his career there).

But there was hope: Nepal is also home to the Gurkha regiment of the British army, famed as one of the most ruthless and accomplished fighting forces in the world. That was the side of the Nepali character Constantine wanted to bring out. ‘The passivity is a fatal flaw when it comes to competing internationally, ‘he says, ‘It has been one of the most pressing issues I’ve had to address, to make them more aware of the ruthless streak inside them’.

Since the end of the SAF games, Constantine has fomented a revolution in Nepali football. ANFA now receives $250,000 a year from Fifa to develop the game, with the result that the national team can enjoy some of the things Western players take for granted. “Now everyone has training shirts, we train harder and twice a day, the players have a special diet programmed, fruit and wheat are at last available in sufficient quantities and we have people coming to give the players massages. The captain told me he’d never had a massage before and he’s 28!

Constantine has also reconstructed the Nepali game, setting up youth teams and looking at the game outside the capital, so players from outside Kathmandu get a chance to make the grade. The result: Nepal’s first professional league got under way this summer.

But none of that would have been possible without the events of summer 1999. Nepal hadn’t been given a hope in the SAF games, even thought they were the hosts. So eyebrows were raised when they kicked off with a 7-0 win over Bhutan, another remote and mountainous Himalayan nation. Next up was Pakistan, one of the teams that would have viewed Nepal as whipping boys. But Nepal’s shock 3-1 victory (for comparison, it would be like Andorra beating Spain) turned football into the national obsession. The streets surrounding the national stadium were filled with fans literally fighting for tickets for the next game; sherpas at Everest base camp, preparing for the long trek up the mountain, went on strike, refusing to assist their paymasters until Nepal were knocked out. The nation was hooked.

The procession continued and Nepal found themselves to their shock, in the semi-finals. Now the big guns came out: Crown Prince Dipendra decided he’d like to watch the game. That doesn’t sound like much in Britain, where you can routinely expect to see the 39th in line to the throne meeting the teams before big games, but in Nepal the news was dynamite. The Nepali royal family is viewed as near deities by their subjects, a reverence compounded by their reclusive ness. They are seldom seen outside the walls of the Royal Palace, let alone caught cavorting on the terraces with a meat pie in one hand and a rattle in the other.Observing thousands of years of protocol, Crown Prince Dipendra chose to forego the terraces and sat instead high in the main stand. But rather than bother with a plastic tip-up seat the had his red and gold throne installed high up in the stand, with garlands and rose petals strewn around.

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