FOOTBALL4GOOD MAGAZINE | MARCH 2020

Previous double page: A child scav- enges the Stung Meanchey rubbish dump for material to sell. Samphors (12) plays at the COLT Community School. Above: In Derm Chan young girls like this must wade through the Mekong river wa- ter to make it home. Below: Derm Chan, Phnom Penh. Right: Vietnamese grave- stones double up as beds in Smor San. improving them. At that point, along- side the free meals and vaccinations, we were still pushing teaching English, perhaps subconsciously thinking a job in a restaurant or a bar later in life would be enough,” says Cubbon. “But was that going to break the cycle of poverty years down the line? Definitely not. In terms of education, we’re talking about kids with absolutely none. They needed to be taught Khmer and be fast-tracked back into the local school system.” “As westerners, you can have your perception of what you think people need but we’re not from Cambodia, we haven’t lived through what they have, and in fact we barely know the country.” Brogan then explained that it took a sobering realisation of who they are and what they know: “None of us had any idea of the NGO sector, and as far as poverty, we knew what it looked like in Australia or the UK. In our profession, we were used to dealing with high-net-worth-indi- viduals with tax or funding issues. It was a cultural shock.” The breakthrough eventually came through football. While out on another visit to a local NGO where Slater and Cubbon were being told once again there was noth- ing ISF could do for them, they strolled past an old dried out former rice field being used as a makeshift football pitch. In passing, the pair mentioned flattening the field for the children to play free of fear from injury, then offer- ing to erect a set of goals, paint lines, and eventually find a coach. Suddenly news spread and they start- ed getting phone calls from across the city. “We said: ‘Look, we’re not in the business of building pitches, however, we can provide the coaches if you’ve got the space’,” Brogan remembers. Cubbon admits that providing local organisations with weekly training ses- sions by paying for coaches, alongside localising management, were among the two things which paved the way towards gaining credibility and cement- ing a local interpretation of what people needed. To this day, out of the 115 staff on the payroll, only two are not Khmer. “Football is a simple game, all it took for us was some open space to play and it enabled far greater reach than we thought possible,” explains Cubbon. “And beyond that, we saw that it created a captive audience, who were more attentive and willing to learn.” Brogan remembers that during a meeting about sponsorship with ANZ Royal, Cambodia’s second largest bank, he was asked by the managing director who was a New Zealander and rugby fanatic: “Have you ever thought about Rugby?” His answer: “Not for longer than a split second.” “When you visit Stung Meanchey, you don’t see an All Black jersey, you don’t see a Wallabies jersey, you see a Real Madrid, a Barcelona, a Man United or an Arsenal jersey.” Through football, they started paying for coaches and soon got support from the Cambodia Football Federation by creating a genuine alternative for young people in Phnom Penh. “FOOTBALL IS A SIMPLE GAME, ALL IT TOOK FOR US WAS SOME OPEN SPACE TO PLAY AND IT ENABLED FAR GREATER REACH THAN WE THOUGHT POSSIBLE” Martin Cubbon 49 KICKSTARTERS