On the eve of his first game, MARY HANNIGANtalks to the Dubliner about his new job as manager of the Faroe Islands
IT WAS three weeks ago, there was an underage football tournament on so Brian Kerr left his Torshavn hotel to go down and have a look at a few games. It was a “beautiful, sunny Saturday morning, about 15 degrees, which, by Faroe Islands’ standards, is heatwave stuff,” he said.
A man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans approached him on the touchline, held out his hand and said: “Hallo Brian, you are very welcome here, we are very pleased that you have come”. Kerr thanked him, asked him about himself. “I am the Prime Minister,” he replied.
He was too. Kaj Leo Johannesen, who, back in the 1990s, won four caps for the Faroe Islands as a goalkeeper. “His son was playing, so there he was on the touchline with the rest of the parents. No handlers, no PR people, no party advisers, just normal behaviour. When the next game started he was refereeing,” he laughs.
The warmth of the greeting from Johannesen has, says Kerr, been mirrored by the reception he has received wherever he has travelled on the islands since his appointment as manager back in April. “Although,” he says, “we haven’t played a game yet, so that might change if things don’t go well.”
The challenge starts this afternoon when group leaders Serbia are the opponents in a World Cup 2010 qualifier.
If the people have warmed to him he’s taken a bit of a shine to them and their homeplace too. He remembers arriving as Republic of Ireland manager in the Faroe Islands in June 2005 for a World Cup qualifying game. There was, he says, “a bit of flak flying, a bit of pressure” after the draw with Israel in Dublin two days before. “I always remember getting off the plane, taking a big deep breath and thinking ‘Good God, this is a very calm place’.”
Four years on and he’s still struck by the serenity of this region of the Kingdom of Denmark, made up of 18 islands in the middle of the North Atlantic, with a population of approximately 50,000.
“It’s the most unique place I’ve ever been,” he says. “We came here on the Monday that time. I remember going through the front door of the airport and there were sheep running around where our bus was parked. The drive from there to the hotel in Torshavn was extraordinary. We went through two tunnels, there were waterfalls cascading down the side of the mountains, fjords, the road was between the mountains and the sea. The landscape was gorgeous. It was so different, so calming.”
And safe, too. Two of his staff are prison wardens, the kitman (who is also the coach of the national handball champions – “he’s a bit of an all-rounder”) and the under-21 manager. “They brought me down for a cup of tea at the prison. ‘How many are here,’ I asked. ‘Oh, it’s full now, they said, ‘12’. Twelve!” “I imagined these people had been convicted of using bad language or abusing a referee because there just doesn’t seem to be any sign of crime, not even a suggestion of it. There was a murder 30 years ago here, there was a bank robbery seven years ago, but they were caught within 10 minutes – they were walking down the road counting the money. It’s different.
“I hadn’t seen a policeman until two players came into training and I asked them what they did. Policemen. I said ‘Jaysus, you must be terrible busy’. Three years they trained in Denmark to come and work here – I don’t know what they do. They say it’s the safest place in the world.
“It’s embarrassing talking about what’s happening in Ireland in terms of violence and crime when you hear someone here say the prison is full with 12 people. It looks a bit like one of those storage places on the M50, it wouldn’t have the walls of Mountjoy. It’s in the town too, it’s not like it’s on Spike Island or anything. Anyone who gets more than one year has to go to Denmark, but I don’t think there’s too many of them.”
The tendency of the locals to leave their doors unlocked, “like a throwback to what I imagine Ireland was like 50 or 60 years ago”, doesn’t quite make it feel like home, but the people, he says, “are very similar to us”.
“They say the Irish monks came here but judging by the – how do I say it? – very Irish look of the people they didn’t spend all their time praying. Very similar traits. Their faces, their skin, their hair colouring. Sometimes I’d be standing around watching a game and they talk to me in Faroese because they think I’m one of them. So I have to apologise and say ‘I don’t understand the Faroese yet’. But they are very, very similar, their humour, their ways, I’d nearly say they’re old style Irish.
“There’s a warmth about them. And the players are very courteous, respectful and mannerly. Simple things – like the dressingroom would always be tidy at the end of training, everything in the bin or in the right place.”
Apart from four players who play full-time in Denmark and another in Iceland the rest of Kerr’s 22-man squad is made up of part-time players who are either working or studying.
“We have four carpenters, at least six full-time students – one of them had to fly to Copenhagen and back for an exam this week – two policemen, an accountant, one fella works in a sports shop, two teachers, Andreas works in a bowling alley, and he’s doing a bit of carpentry as well. Simun is full-time in Iceland, Suni works in a fish factory, I think Frodi’s a builder, Jakup is a teacher but he’s on the town council as well, he’s like a TD. That’s kind of the run of it. The pool is quite limited, there’s no one at Milan we’ve missed out on. The Granny Rule isn’t much help either, the Faroese haven’t been huge at emigration.”
Making himself understood to his players hasn’t proved to be a problem. “Everyone speaks English to me, the players listen and no one says ‘what’s he saying?’ I have to talk a bit slower, it’s only fair I slow down my Dublinese vernacular. I went looking to see if I could get an English-Faroese phrase book but there isn’t one. There’s a very academic looking book, but it’d look like I was going to University.
“They’re remarkable, everyone seems to have English, the Danish seems to be natural to them, they seem to know Icelandic, they’re alright with a bit of Swedish and Finnish as well. It makes us Irish gang look a bit gobshitey. You talk to them in embarrassment because you kind of expect them to speak in English. Theirs is a kind of a Norse language. The writing looks Norwegian, I look at the paper and I can’t make head nor tail of it, so I just look at the pictures.”
His staff are all locals, Jens Martin Knudsen, assistant to Kerr’s predecessor, staying on to be his right-hand man. Knudsen, famous for the bobble cap he wore while playing, made 65 appearances for the Faroe Islands as goalkeeper, his most memorable performance the one against Austria in a Euro 92 qualifier when the Faroes won 1-0 and he made too many saves to count.
“It’s a big challenge to say the least. When you take on a team that’s 166 in the Fifa rankings, that last won a competitive game in 2004, you have a fair idea of what you’re coming into. The ability of the players is obviously not as high as what I’ve seen or worked with in the past and looking at the four games in the group so far they had less than 10 per cent of possession.
“My own instinct is to have a go, I don’t like watching my teams playing in their own half, and hanging on and hoping they don’t concede by defending deep, I’m not used to that. They seem to be quite calm about it, but I don’t know if I can be. But these are the things I’m going to learn and test out over this match and the next (at home to France in August).
“But apart from not hearing the word recession once since I came here – unemployment’s at about three per cent – the best thing has been the enthusiasm. There’s huge interest in football. One day last week I went to three league matches, I reckon there was about 4,500, combined, at the games – that’s almost 10 per cent of the population. In many ways it’s like the tradition of the GAA in the country. It’s one of the smallest places in Europe, yet they have these rivalries between the different towns, much as we’d have in intercounty football and hurling – places like Runavik, Toftir, Klaksvik and Torshavn, it’s nearly like Cork and Dublin and Galway and Tyrone, it’s a fierce rivalry.”
It’s an adventure like no other, one that enthralls him despite the limitations of his players and, consequently, what he can realistically achieve over his two-and-half-year contract.
“It’s a long way away from matches in Paris, 80,000 and all that, but they’re no less passionate here in their own way. I hardly had time to check the reports on Ireland against Bulgaria, it’s funny to be out of that, to be not that bothered any more, because I’m really engrossed in what I’m doing here. I’m happy to be back in it. It’s as busy as I’ve been for a few years, the last week or so, it’s been helter skelter. I’m edgy as ever, I want to do as well as I can for them so I’ve thrown myself into it.”
