OUR MAN IN CAMBODIA
An on-pitch riot and bans for many of his players were early signs that Limerick’s Conor Nestor was a long way from home
‘OUR KIT MAN GOT PUNCHED, THE STAND EMPTIED, IT WAS A FULL RIOT’
ON WEDNESDAY afternoon, Conor Nestor sat in the pleasant chaos of Phnom Penh international airport, thinking of the Guinness back home. It has been more than two and a half years since he tasted a proper pint of plain and it was the first thing he planned on doing once he touched down in Shannon, via Doha and Heathrow.
‘They have bottles here, and the locals are quite fond of them, but it’s not the same thing. I might just head to the bar before I even collect my bags!’ the Limerick native quipped as he waited to board the first leg of his 14,500km journey.
There may be time for a jar or two in the coming days, as he has a bit of catching up to do around Foynes. And Nestor will have a story or two to tell about his adventures since leaving his development officer role with the FAI in 2016.
He arrives home as the coach who led Preah Khan Reach Svay Rieng to the Cambodian League title last month, only missing out on a domestic double after losing the cup final on penalties. They achieved this despite having only the fifth-biggest budget in the league.
Indeed, for much of the season, it looked like Svay Rieng would become the Cambodian version of Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’.
Going into their 26th and final game of the league season, they were still unbeaten. However, last year’s champions beat them. Typically, it was the game which Nestor’s mother, sister and brother-in-law had flown over from Ireland to watch.
‘Maybe, they jinxed us,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘In hindsight, losing the last game and even losing the cup final was probably not the worst thing. If we had gone through the entire season undefeated, we might have thought we are better than we actually were.’
Svay Rieng’s reward for their remarkable season is a place in the play-offs for the AFC Cup, Asia’s version of the Europa League, which means Nestor needs to be back in Cambodia before Christmas to start pre-season. But how did Nestor, a former
Limerick FC Under-19 coach, end up working in football in a country better-known here for its place on the backpacking trail and the atrocities of Khmer Rouge?
‘There aren’t too many Irish coaches in far-flung, random destinations. I think it was just a case of being in the right place at the right time,’ Nestor reckons.
Having left Ireland after nearly a decade working with the FAI in the Limerick/Kerry region, he ventured initially to the US where he spent a bit of time observing Orlando City manager James O’Connor when he worked at Louisville, before arriving in Australia.
‘In 2016, I was getting itchy feet. I wanted a fuller coaching role. As a development officer, you are not working with the same players, day-in, day-out. I worked with a lot of talented young players in Limerick and Kerry, but my frustration at the time was that I wasn’t getting enough time with them. I went to the States, primarily to do a bit of networking, because I had my
UEFA A licence. But there were no opportunities, so I ended up in Melbourne, where a friend of mine involved in an academy, offered me a role.’
Nestor couldn’t stay in Australia while the paperwork for his visa was processed, so he headed to South-East Asia for a few months. While in Phnom Penh, he sourced a coaching job with an international school. That led to a position coaching a semi-pro team, which got him noticed. ‘We won a few games that we shouldn’t have,’ Nestor remembers. ‘We beat a couple of professional teams and from there, I found myself sitting in front of the Svay
Rieng bosses, being interviewed for the job. And being offered it. It was all a bit of a whirlwind.’
At just 33, Nestor was given the opportunity to manage a team of professional footballers.
‘I had a bit of a dilemma, with a job already in Australia. Well, it wasn’t much of a dilemma. I had to stay here and take the chance of working with professional players.’
Svay Rieng is a city right on the Vietnamese border, in one of the less-developed parts of this developing country.
There aren’t any facilities conducive to training a professional outfit, so Nestor and his players stay in the Cambodian capital.
‘We live and train in Phnom Penh, because the facilities are obviously much better here. Our home games end up being like away games. We have to travel two and a half hours for a home match, and a two-and-half hour drive in Cambodia is not like going up the road from Limerick to Dublin. There’s always two or three near-death experiences, and you have to be on the look-out for snakes.’
Having made an average start as manager – two wins, two draws and two defeats in his opening matches – things took a turn for the worse in his seventh match, at home to the National Defence side, when a bout of ‘handbags’ between players on the pitch escalated into a full-scale riot. ‘Last season ended up being a baptism of fire. It was Murphy’s Law. Whatever could go wrong, did. We played National Defence in our seventh game. It was 1-1 with about 20 minutes left when the lights went out. When they came back on, we missed an open goal and they went down the other end and scored with a deflection. After their goal, there was handbags between one of our players and someone on their team. ‘Then our kit-mat got punched by one of their Japanese players. That was like a bomb going off. The stand emptied and there was pretty much a full-blown riot on the pitch.’ The repercussions were devastating. Almost half of Nestor’s squad were given 11-match suspensions, including his first and secondchoice goalkeepers and a handful of established Cambodian internationals. The season was effectively over for them.
Nestor tried to regroup and saw out the season with a number of inexperienced players who had been on the fringes of their squad.
‘The experience of all those suspensions ended up having a positive effect on the team this season, because the younger players learnt how to cope in an environment they weren’t used to.
‘I knew if the club were strong enough to keep with me for this season that we would be able to build on it,’ Nestor explains.
Svay Rieng are unusual in Cambodian soccer in that they have no connection to a government institution and instead are run by a local businessman, who is the chairman.
Fortunately for Nestor, he was surrounded by like-minded people at the club. He has a great relationship with his general manager, a Scot called Christopher Grant.
‘He’s the same age as me, so we get on well, apart from the fact that
he’s a Hearts supporter,’ he laughs.
And the chairman was convinced by Nestor’s suggestion that the younger players would grow after being plunged into the deep end last year. ‘The chairman is a good guy. He believes that football can be a positive influence on Cambodian culture and society,’ he says.
Nestor’s belief had substance. Having gained the experience, Svay Rieng went on a remarkable unbeaten run, backboned by homegrown players. In Cambodia, clubs are allowed to have five foreign players, including one from another Asian nation, in their squad.
Nestor was able to lean on an American centre-half and an English player, Charles Matchell, who came through the Newcastle academy, last term. Indeed, Nestor was one of only two foreign coaches in the League that is at the centre of growing the game in this part of the world.
Those who backpacked around Cambodia more than a decade ago, when it was still possible to buy grenades on Phnom Penh’s central market, might be surprised by how the country is changing.
‘It is still a developing country, and it still has all the signs of a fast-growing economy, when there are plenty of Range Rovers going down streets that have plenty of people begging on them,’ Nestor points out. ‘But the sense, when I came here for the first time, was that this is a country that is coming close to a tipping point. It reminded me of Ireland in around 1987, ’88, just before the Celtic Tiger. It had that sort of feel.
‘My mother is 75, and when she was coming over with my sister and brother-in-law, she was absolutely terrified. She thought she was coming to the wild, wild east, wouldn’t be able to eat any of the food, anything like that. But she was blown away by what she found here. She loved the people, loved the place. The people are like the Irish in that they are always looking for an opportunity for a laugh or a joke around the next corner, often to my detriment.’
Football is the most popular sport in Cambodia, by some distance. Nestor was impressed by the passion for the game. Although Svay Rieng attract crowds of less than 3,000, the national team, in the lower reaches of the FIFA rankings, draw upwards of 50,000 to their matches.
‘Football is in the blood of the people and in their hearts and minds. Every street you turn down, there’s someone wearing a football jersey, sometimes it could even be our jersey, although they are not coming to our games. The Premier League is massive here, everyone is into it. Man United and Liverpool are big, as you would expect.’
Football acts as a cultural touchstone for locals. A decade ago, mentioning Roy Keane was the easiest way to get a Phnom Penh tuk-tuk driver to make an association with Ireland.
‘That only works now if they remember the 2002 World Cup,’ says Nestor, who had an NGO official from Ireland work as his translator in his early days at the club.
Improving the fortunes of the national team has been seen as integral to growing the nation’s status among its neighbours. Former Japanese star Keisuke Honda has been installed as manager.
‘I met him a few weeks ago, for a development meeting on the future of Cambodian soccer and I was thinking it was funny that five years ago, he was playing for AC Milan in the Champions League and I was coaching young kids in Ballingarry. And here we were now, the two of us, thrashing out ideas about how to grow the game in Cambodia.’
When Nestor started coaching in the country, he felt that the abilities of the players belied their lowly status in the FIFA rankings.
‘I was amazed by the technical level of the players when I first came here, because they are so far down the FIFA rankings.
‘Technically, the players are very good. They are all good at controlling the ball, they are able to deliver these 60- or 70-yard crossfield balls. So, there’s a lot of potential there. It was just the daily habits, the professionalism, a bit of discipline and just the tactical nous that maybe is not where it should be.
‘But those are all things that can be worked on, if there is a willingness to learn and get better. And that is what we have with the players at our club.’
It’s going to be a long process. Earlier this month month, Nestor watched Cambodia lose a World Cup qualifier to Hong Kong 2-0, despite having the bulk of possession.
‘That is something that has to be worked on. It was the same with us in the cup final, we had most of the ball, but just didn’t have that bit of magic in the final third.’
Nestor’s work in Svay Rieng hasn’t happened completely off-grid. Every C-League game is shown live on Facebook, and Nestor has noticed a few people logging on from Limerick, and other parts of Ireland.
So, there are a few who know what he has achieved in Cambodia. And a few more will know in the coming weeks. But he hopes this is only the start for his team.
‘It’s an exciting time for the club, going into the AFC Cup,’ Nestor says. ‘But of course, if things don’t go well at the start of the season, it might all get tense again.’
That’s the way it is with football management. The ground beneath is never too solid. But Nestor couldn’t imagine it any other way.