This Is Guernsey

By Nick Mollet

A CHANNEL Islands league may be the way to go if Guernsey and Jersey wish to continue their aspirations of one day playing international football. That is the view of Steve Menary, a freelance writer and journalist who has just written a book about football which includes a chapter devoted solely to the Channel Islands.

‘If they had an inter-island league, it’s not unrealistic to think they could play at a higher standard. Maybe that is the way to go,’ he told the Guernsey Press.

He does not believe it could in future be unrealistic to think Guernsey could match what the likes of Liechtenstein have done on the international football front.

But currently he believes the chances of making the international breakthrough with Uefa is remote unless they decided to accommodate the smaller nations.

‘I think at the moment the sticking point is Gibraltar. At the moment the rules are you have to be a country defined by the United Nations, which was done primarily to stop Gibraltar joining and Spain pulling out of everything,’ said Menary.

His first book, ‘Outcasts! The Lands That FIFA Forgot’, examines the much tarnished reputation of the governing body of world football and how they justify the exclusion of some ‘nations’ from their organisation while welcoming others.

For two years, he traced the incredible journeys of the teams that Fifa refused to recognise - either for political expediency reasons or because they just believed they could not compete with the likes of Montserrat on the world stage.

Intrigued as to why anyone would want to play for such no-hope ‘nations’, he became drawn into a scene which surprised him in its positive approach to both the beautiful game and nationalism.

It eventually resulted in the Fifi [Federation of International Football Independents] ‘Wild Cup’, featuring teams from officially non-existent countries such as Zanzibar, Greenland, Tibet and Northern Cyprus, being successfully staged in Germany prior to the Fifa World Cup in 2006.

Menary devotes a whole chapter of his book to ‘The Channel Island Divide’.

It mentions the GFA exploring whether Guernsey could potentially be recognised as a nation in its own right and suggests the early indications were positive but stresses the matter required considerable further investigation.

Menary talks to the people involved in discussions with Uefa a couple of years ago from both the Guernsey and Jersey football associations and his findings provide a fascinating insight into all the various factors that have to be taken into account when looking to become a ‘football nation’.