The below is an edited extract from CONIFA: Football For The Forgotten, a book on CONIFA’s world of football for unrecognised nations featuring sides ranging from Tibet, Northern Cyprus and Tuvalu to Cascadia, the Chagos Islands and Kabylia.

Written by by Dublin-based author James Hendicott, it’s available now on Amazon.

IT’S A MONTH before the 2018 CONIFA World Football Cup, and Englishman Justin Walley is sat in front of his computer completing his latest bout of unlikely admin on behalf of a team of amateur Zimbabwean footballers.

Walley signed on as a football manager for seperatist region Matabeleland, but has become something far more: part social media manager, part skills coach and the man required to hop through countries and across continents in an attempt to both train the inexperienced, and fund the seemingly impossible.

Walley, from Leicestershire, but resident in Riga, Latvia, is an unlikely frontman for Bulawayo-based Matabeleland’s campaign to reach CONIFA’s tournament in London.

Having become involved in CONIFA after one of their executive members contacted him looking to buy Latvian club football shirts, Walley found a group of like-minded, ambitious football fans, and quickly made friends. Eventually he connected more firmly with the organisation, too, became its African Director, and was ultimately recruited to lead the poverty-stricken African side within an organisation designed to represent unrecognised states in the footballing arena.

With four weeks to go until London, Walley finds himself desperately trying to sell Matabeleland’s stunningly designed kits in order to fund flights, visas and accommodation for his players. On top of the shirts – two beautifully unusual, tribally-patterned collector’s items – his crowdfunding campaign also includes options to eat meals with the players in London, train with the team, and fund corporate sponsorship opportunities. There are even pieces of Zimbabwe’s inflation-hit currency up for sale; the fundraising target is a hefty $40,000.

This is not, it’s fair to say, how journeys to international football tournaments typically start.

The splendid Matabeleland jersey.

Matabeleland’s last-gasp securing of visas and the funds necessary to travel to London is tight – too tight for the comfort of Walley and his squad – but also poignant and heartwarming. Walley’s borderline begging on behalf of his squad on social media simply reflects his passion for what this side have achieved.

Ultimately, it’s a loan from the manager’s mother, paid back after the tournament, that pushes the team’s funding over the line and gets them on the plane.

Like most other CONIFA teams, this Matabeleland squad doesn’t have a single player involved with Zimbabwe’s national team, or even particularly close to it. Since 2006, the Matabele region has had a separatist party campaigning for independence from a position of exile in South Africa.

The Matabeleland Freedom Party calls for an independent Matabele nation in today’s west Zimbabwe, under a constitutional monarchy. Their separatist reasoning makes for a strong case. The region was targeted by Robert Mugabe during his long reign in Zimbabwe, largely because the Ndebele people are of a different tribal origin to Mugabe’s Shona people, and tended to malign Mugabe.

Over the course of decades, Matabeleland suffered an estimated 30,000 deaths at the hands of their own Mugabe-led government and his forces. In particular, the region was regularly targeted by a group called Five Brigade, led by a brutal warlord, Perence ‘Black Jesus’ Shiri, so named as he could decide the course of a life, like Jesus.

Shiri’s army were gruesome: their crimes included the raping of village women, and later returning to kill those who had become pregnant as a result. They buried alive those who they suspected opposed Mugabe, and forced other villagers to dance atop the graves of their neighbours, all while chanting songs in praise of Mugabe’s government. Not many sportsmen, understandably, connected with the national football team.

“These things are all interconnected,” Matabeleland FA President and charity worker Busani Sibindi tells me of the team and his other humanitarian work.

“In Matabeleland we have got football and arts,” he continues. “These are like second nature to us. Football is more than a hobby. Most of the guys who play football in this part of the country use it as a kind of empowerment. They also use it as a way of getting out of a lot of other problems that may be affecting them. But most people see it as an opportunity to go to other places and improve their lives.”

“You have to recognise that football is a very simple sport to start playing,” Sibindi says of the local appeal of the game.

“You only need a pitch and a ball most of the time. When we were growing up as young boys, we would make plastic balls from trash, so we didn’t need anything. If you’ve got challenges in life, soccer clubs give you some kind of social status.

For the people of Matabeleland, this team is a massive breakthrough. It’s a peace building initiative that gives people hope.”

Ahead of the tournament, social media pictures show the Matabeleland squad jogging down the side of dusty roads in matching t-shirts. Large lorries pass inches from them, but they’re smiling as the sweat drips from their heat-pressured bodies. The opportunity they’re being given is a rare one for people from such backgrounds, and every moment of it, no matter how tough, is to be savoured.

When coach Walley had arrived months earlier, his men were training with two balls, one of which was quite flat. They had no bibs to identify teams, and no cones to complete basic exercises. Training on a hardened pitch, they didn’t have any real experience of football on grass, at least not as they could expect to encounter in Europe.

On a visa run to neighbouring Botswana, Walley spent $100 on basic training equipment, and set about preparing his team.

“Their pitch wasn’t a shocking, shocking pitch by African standards, but it was rubbish,” he recalls.

“Some of the away pitches we played on, they had glass on, poo, stuff like that. We didn’t have money, so before long we started training on the public pitch, which was just a dirt patch, really.”

“The first time I saw Matabeleland, they were playing a friendly against a Zimbabwean second tier team,” he recalls.

“They had a team, and had qualified for CONIFA London by playing lots of fixtures against local clubs and against a CONIFA side in Zambia. They were very good on fitness, but in certain senses, they weren’t very good at all. Particularly upper body strength, stuff like that.”

“My opinion was that a lot of that needed to be changed around. I did all the technical stuff across a few sessions, then I was away for about two or three months. They kind of went with what I set up, and developed a new way of playing.”

“Honestly, if we’d been able to play football on the surfaces we were used to in London, we’d have beaten a lot of teams. You can’t play football on those surfaces without practise. I don’t know how they do it. They know the pace of the bounce, which is very quick. It’s very different, very strange.”

The entire set up in Matabeleland, Walley assesses, would have been unacceptable to a park club in London. Unhygienic and sometimes dangerous pitches, combined with an almost complete absence of equipment or resources, was to make the entire process a big uphill battle.

Walley was determined to make it work.

Establishing the involvement of Bruce Grobbelaar in the side was a major coup for the side, both in terms of motivation and the status he provided. His appearances in London alongside the players became one of the tournament’s talking points.

“I just emailed him, and he replied three days later,” Walley recalls. “We agreed to meet to have a chat. I met him at the M6 services in Wolverhampton, and just asked him to join us.”

Getting a big-name former pro involved might seem like a no-brainer, but even Grobbelaar’s very welcome inclusion wasn’t without its concerns for Walley as he prepared for London.

“I was thinking that by him agreeing, he might end up in the shit somehow, and I’d feel responsible,” Walley explained, acknowledging the political sensitivity of the situation.

He liked the project. Highlanders FC, from Bulawayo in Matabeleland, was his first professional club, and he wanted to be involved. He liked the concept.”

“I think for half an hour he was casing me out, whether I was genuine, and then I convinced him that what we were doing was worth getting involved in. He’s been involved in lots of things in his life, including things like the Rhodesian Bush War. He’s a very experienced man, and I had to trust he can make judgements for himself on what’s in his best interests.”

A view from the Conifa final. James Hendicott. James Hendicott.

“We weren’t coming to the tournament to win,” the manager continues. “I think some of the players might have thought we were, and I did try to explain that it’s just not realistic. If we’d had another six months, though, it might have been different.”

There’s no question the Matabeleland side has plenty going for them. Physically fit and attempting to play football in a technical and imaginative way, they’re naive but very capable, and it’s easy to see a case for the side being really quite strong with a little more experience.

Walley, though, stepped down after the tournament, seeing little realistic prospect of continuing his adventure any further .

“It’s cost me a lot of money,” he admitted. “I realised when I turned up that the stuff it had been agreed they would give me while I was there, that wouldn’t last. It had been about two weeks, and it was obvious they’d run out of money. I was financing the team with travel and lunches and stuff like that. It adds up, over a few months.”

“I also had to fly in and out of South Africa, as if I’d flown straight into Zimbabwe, I might have been told to bugger off at the airport, or arrested or something. All that travel, in and out of Johannesburg, the hotels, the buses, that came to hundreds of dollars.”

“I walked around as a tourist, because things were a bit volatile. There were almost no tourists there, but a volunteer visa was too expensive. I was lying low for some of it, during the Mugabe troubles, worried that being caught with a British passport, I might be seen as a spook or something.”

In London, the team were competitive, but faced different problems.

“In Zimbabwe, you can’t even see the pitch markings, you can’t see where the halfway line is a lot of the time.

Setting yourself up with an offside trap, defending the last line, all that stuff is very difficult to coach in Zimbabwe,” Walley said of the contrast between Matabeleland’s previous experience and the CONIFA tournament.

“They kind of learnt on their feet in London. We developed, I think.”

When the Matabeleland squad ultimately arrived for their first game in London, they danced from their team bus into Sutton United’s Gander Lane, down the tunnel towards their changing rooms and into the rugged heart of the stand, chanting in their native Ndebele as they went. Half an hour later, they emerged onto the 3G pitch to face Italian tournament favourites Padania.

Matabeleland walk out for the meeting with Padania. James Hendicott James Hendicott

Dressed in a black kit littered with complex red and yellow patterns, several players reached down to pick and scratch at the unfamiliar fake grass beneath their feet.

“With the Padania game,” Walley said of Matabeleland’s 6-1 opening day defeat to a team made up of Italian fourth-tier players, “you’d have expected a team that’s never played anyone at anywhere near that level to go out and get an absolute thrashing.

“We scored in the second half and came into the game. We had two one-on-ones with their goalkeeper, too. That could have been 6-3 in the end, and we gifted them a couple of terrible goals. I thought it was very respectable. We grew into things as the tournament went on, too.”

“It was like a back to front pyramid, how we did it,” Walley concludes as he looks back at the entire process.

“There was a huge amount of money raised, especially by my friends. The best part of $25,000 just from friends, and lots of strangers from all around the world helped, too. Then the volunteers came in, and people like CNN Africa and Paddy Power got involved on the media side. We got huge media coverage. There’s all these layers of people helping us, playing into us getting to London.”

“I’d said to the team, when we go out to London, we’ve got to express ourselves. Apart from the games, we’ve got to go over and show everyone who we are. I’ve always hated how football players will stand on the half way line and clap fans. Why can’t they come down and do it. They’re not different, or special. I tried to get that through to my players.

“We went and spoke to the fans at the end, and met with them. That’s Matabeleland, that’s who the team are. They realised that’s a good thing to do.”

“I don’t think any other team playing at anything like that kind of level have ever gone and shaken hands with all the crowd like our players did after the Padania game. That’s just who they are.”

Matabeleland finished in 13th of 16 teams at CONIFA’s world tournament in London, 2018, winning two of their five competitive games, including defeating the full national team of Tuvalu, the only fully-recognised nation at the tournament. They also fielded Bruce Grobbelaar in a friendly win against the Chagos Islands.