When the interview was over, she walked me past the hopeful signs in reception (‘THIS IS A NO HITTING PLACE’) to the door, shook my hand, and said, ‘We’re not a bureaucracy.’
[August 5]
10 Ryan Nelsen
Eight Million Dollar Man
The dream is England. The dream is a summer’s day in August, twenty-one pleasant degrees, driving from Cheshire to report for duty at ten in the morning at a training ground in Lancashire. The dream is breakfast and lunch all laid on, valet service for your car, the nice ladies in the office, talking in Coronation Street accents, who say: ‘Ryan? Phone for you, love.’
But this is merely the outskirts of the dream that Ryan Nelsen is living. What he truly wanted when growing up in Cashmere in Christchurch is the real thing that he will experience this weekend – playing a game of football in the English Premier League, ninety minutes of the best life. The press are wont to call him Admiral Nelsen. He is captain of Blackburn Rovers, who are about to play Middlesbrough in the opening game of the 2007–2008 season. Next weekend, Blackburn host Arsenal; September is away to Chelsea; November is consecutive games against Liverpool and Manchester United – football at the very highest level, all the time, the dream fulfilled.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘can’t complain.’
We spoke on Thursday. He had just arrived at the club’s training ground. The drive in from his nice home in Wilmslow, Cheshire (‘There’s quite a few footballers wandering around the area’), the good weather, the excitement and anticipation of a new season about to kick off. It was strange to hear his obvious New Zealand voice coming down the phone; he sounded so casual, so relaxed, all the usual national characteristics, like a guy who might have been passing the time of day in an office anywhere in New Zealand.
Nelsen, twenty-nine, was surely confirmed as New Zealand’s highest-paid athlete – much more than any All Black; more, calculated one newspaper economist, than the entire Black Caps squad – when he signed a new five-year contract with Blackburn, earning him an estimated 60,000 quid a week, or about eight million New Zealand dollars a year. Impossible to get a grasp on such figures. Impossible, too, to entertain the notion that he plays against world-class footballers such as Ronaldo, Berbatov, Drogba, Fàbregas, Torres, and even a few players with English names.
Fact: Nelsen’s achievement is the fantasy of every New Zealander who has played football as boy or man. He said, ‘It’s fantastic. Sometimes when you have a bad day, you kind of have to take a couple of steps back, and go, “Oh, hang on, this is pretty good what I’ve got here.” I’m extremely lucky. It’s something I always dreamed of as a kid. So I’m loving bloody every minute of it.’
Nelsen was regarded as a good all-round sportsman at school, at St Thomas College – he played rugby, cricket, tennis, basketball. On his mother Christine’s side of the family, though, were a tribe of footballers, the Smiths, who played for New Zealand. ‘When I was about four or five, they came and threw me on the field where the other guys were playing, so I just sort of joined in. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d probably have gone into rugby if my old man had anything to say about it. Just as well he didn’t.’
He took out a subscription to Shoot! magazine; he remembers watching the 1986 World Cup on TV. But there was hardly any televised football back then, almost no exposure to the beautiful game.
‘You’re right, there wasn’t much going on. But for some reason it just stuck with me. All my friends went off to play rugby, but I stayed playing soccer. I just loved the game.’
Children’s soccer on Saturdays in New Zealand, a few parents on the sidelines, a cold wind beating a path through the bare poplars, a gasping dad running around as referee, while the bigger boys and the bigger posts and the bigger sense of occasion are at the nearby rugby fields – the distance from here to the professional game in England can seem ridiculous.
He said, ‘Even now, a lot of people in New Zealand will look at the Premier League, see the level of football there, and think that it’s another planet. But in reality it’s not. You’ve just got to work hard and do the right things. It’s very achievable, very attainable for any young kid in New Zealand.’
His morning newspaper of choice is The Times, he met his wife Monica in Minnesota, he said things like, ‘I know a lot of people who take their holidays in Lithuania.’ He hunts down Central Otago pinot noir when he can, and the club’s chef serves New Zealand lamb. Was there much of a New Zealand presence in Blackburn? ‘Besides me, no.’ Last year, he described his adopted city thus: ‘It’s a low-income area. The majority work long hours for not much money, they live in rows of houses with no back lawn, it’s raining all the time, they’ve got no beach, no mountains, no river running through.’ On Thursday, his vision of Blackburn had mellowed: ‘It’s beautiful up here, actually. Rolling green hills, stereotypical English farmland …’
Nelsen signed on with Blackburn at twenty-seven. He’d left New Zealand at eighteen to take up a scholarship in North Carolina, and later attended Stanford University, graduating in political science. He played for American club D.C. United and won the Major League Soccer title. His views on the spectacular arrival of David Beckham in the US: ‘The exposure he’s given to MLS has just been incredible. He’s worth all the money they pay him … Everybody in England, and it’s the same in New Zealand, underestimates the level
