Giske FC

Pre-match photo Dynamic Stars (can't remember who they were playing either)

Blue and white stripes are the colours of Giske FC, the only football team on the small archipelago island of the same name twenty miles or so from the mainland, Norway, and across the exciting looking outcrops of grey that hang out west from the coast on the google map, like big clumsy troll fingers turned to stone, or the tendril like fjords, running blue between them, seeking shelter further inland from some north wind on the westerly coast of the country, where it meets the Norwegian Sea, or in the photograph below. It's a small place with a lot of fisherman/fish and the football club ground is, unsurprisingly, near the sea. The ball keeps going in the water.

Giske

I have a friend from the island (whose not a fisherman but I think her granddad was) and she asked the local team if they had anything to give towards GoalZambia's work in southern Africa. They gave the shirts. They gave equipment; balls, pumps, goal keepers jerseys and plastic cones to run around and more. That's the kind of kit the academy needs (apart from football boots - everybody dreams of a pair of boots but very few have them, even a crap pair. If there are any they are shared around the team. but they rarely fit and literally fall apart before your eyes during a match. Most kids just get on with playing barefooted because they can't wait around for a dream or a pair of boots, whether they fit or not, when the biggest matches in the world come round thick and fast each week). My friend brought them over to London on one of her visits and we got them over to Zambia thereafter. The team had a whip round at the full time whistle of one of their home league matches, raising and donating £350. I don't know who they were playing and what the boat they came on looked like but it doesn't really matter.  Other people and organisations did a similar thing to Giske FC and i'll be posting some of their photographs as and when I do. The  blue and white stripes were a winner though, there was no doubt.

It was difficult to explain to the lads and lasses in the academy where these shirts came from when they put them on although I didn't stop trying. There is not a sea in Zambia and most of the lives of the members have been spent in the compound or those like it, or in their family tribal villages. The lucky ones may have been on a school trip years ago to the Victoria Falls and Livingstone. They don't really remember it that well and seem relatively less impressed than what the travel brochures say. They raised their eyes at me, listening politely, then slightly bemused, when I told them i'd seen my first elephant, like you would in this country to someone who told you they'd just seen their first small cat, mainly, and perhaps simply, because that doesn't happen all that much (something like that anyway). It was hard for them to imagine, I suppose, but they invariably liked the photo of the small island with a lot of fisherman in the middle of the Norwegian Sea and laughed wonderingly at how the inhabitants got there. Zambia is not a seafaring nation.

Giske away

And now I sometimes think about Giske and wonder how it is there and the fisherman and trolls and the football pitch by the sea, even though I have never been. And the boats and the team. I would like to go there one day and watch them play.