Then again, it’s not every day that a tiny chain of islands which has never previously had a football team comes knocking.
The Marshall Islands are outliers in every sense. Spread across five islands and 29 coral atolls, the country sits slap bang in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There are only two ways to get there, one involves a flight from Hawaii, the other a transit from Brisbane. In short, it’s a long, long way from Oxford City.
That was the most recent stop-off in Lloyd Owers’ coaching career before the Marshall Islands came calling out of the blue towards the end of 2022. Now he’s overseeing the setting up a national team entirely from scratch, as the last country on earth to have one begins playing catch-up with the rest of the world.
“We started on January 5, pretty much,” Owers, 33, says. “We had ownership from the board, who basically said to us ‘just go and do something’, because since the board was set-up in 2020 but had pretty much sat idle.
This story is from the April 09, 2023 edition of The Non-League Football Paper.
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This story is from the April 09, 2023 edition of The Non-League Football Paper.
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