Nelsen’s form in the US got him the deal at Blackburn. They’re a solid team, finished tenth in the 2006–2007 season and made the semi-final of the FA Cup. A win would have made Nelsen the first New Zealander to play in an FA Cup final at Wembley Stadium, but he was skinned alive twice, allowing Chelsea to score twice and win 2–1. Consistently, though, Nelsen rates as among the very best defenders in the Premier League. Watching him is like a lesson in the defensive arts: his sense of timing, his expert positioning, his smooth passing. Blackburn are not especially pretty – they go by the nickname Blackeye Rovers – but when it comes to homicidal rage, Nelsen leaves it out. He’s a calm figure, poised, steady.
You might get away with saying that he plays with a New Zealand attitude. Does he view that kind of temperament as an advantage in the Premier League? ‘I’d like to think so, yeah,’ he said. ‘Most New Zealanders are laid-back, but we’re hard workers, and don’t let things stand in our way, and what will be, will be. A lot of players are daunted when they get to this level, but being from New Zealand, I just see it as a challenge and go for it. I don’t know any other way.’
His club are confident of a top ten finish in the league, with maybe a good run in Europe’s UEFA Cup – next week, they play in Finland. Nelsen is just one of a dozen or so nationalities in the team. They include immense American goalkeeper Brad Friedel, new eight-million-quid signing Roque Santa Cruz from Paraguay (Nelsen: ‘Great guy. Speaks about six languages’), black South African striker Benni McCarthy, Brett Emerton from Australia, Morten Gamst Pederson from Norway, and rising star David Bentley (‘He’s still got a lot of learn, but he’s a great kid’) who, remarkably, is English.
Nelsen’s dream also includes the physical regime of ice baths after every game (‘Horrible. One of the worst things you can possibly do’), the ‘dogfight’ of thirty-eight games in the Premier League season. ‘It’s a business here. It’s a business of winning football games, and whatever it takes to win football games. Every stone will get unturned to find out how to win football games. It’s full on. Switch off for a second and you’ll be punished. You can get beaten by any team, whether they’re first or last. It’s just non-stop. Every game is just an absolute grind’ – he said all of this with such pleasure, such relish.
[August 12]
11 Wayne Idour
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Dunedin private investigator Wayne Idour said, ‘I’m just a small sprat in a big pond.’ At fifty-seven, age had turned the colour of his standard-issue police moustache to ash. His knees and hips were in bad shape. His broad frame came wrapped in a warm black overcoat he bought in a factory sale. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. I didn’t notice him as he sat alone in a café.
That was on a winter’s morning in August. The flight to Dunedin had been delayed because of that delicious phrase ‘ice on the runway’. Snow down to 400 metres, its white coat worn lightly on Saddle Hill and Mortgage Hill, a temperature high of four degrees, the flat harbour so cold to look at that it seemed to wear a sign reading ‘DO NOT TOUCH’. Modern city, modern rates and rents. But what a visitor notices is olde Dunedin: the intoxicating smell of coal smoke in daytime, the citizens with ‘sober drops at the end of their cold noses’ – an antique line from Janet Frame. And these from Denis Glover: ‘Over the harbour waters / A slow-gonged clock / Floats the hours / And the quarters.’
The gongs pushed out the raft of eleven o’clock when I met Idour, when that unremarkable man made himself known. I had negotiated with his lawyer, Frazer Barton, to secure the interview. No inquiries, said Barton, were to be made about his client’s involvement in what might be termed ‘delicate matters’.
During the last election, Idour was hired by the Exclusive Brethren to spy on the Labour Party. Earlier this year, he was revealed as the source – ‘one of the sources,’ he claimed – behind Investigate magazine’s revelations that police commissioner Howard Broad had once screened a bestiality porn movie at a party in his home.
Such scandals. Do tell. ‘We’re not going down that road,’ said Idour, once, twice, three times, four times. But that road led somewhere towards Idour’s character. What sort of guy would act the way he had? Oh, Barton had said, he’s larger than life. Idour didn’t seem like that kind of rooster at all. I asked how much time he had ever spent living outside of Dunedin. He said, ‘Not a lot. Very little. About a year and a half.’ Where? ‘Invercargill.’
He talked about honour, respect, loyalty. ‘I just want to help people,’ he said, once, twice, three times … five times … eight times – in all, over two hours, eleven times. It was as regular as clockwork, Idour’s own slow gong, floating his position across the table.
He seemed to believe he had been more sinned against than sinning. When his role in the Exclusive Brethren surveillance of the Labour Party was revealed, prime minister Helen Clark came up with a good word to describe those kind of tactics: ‘Obnoxious.’ Deputy prime minister Michael Cullen called them ‘sordid’.
Was it possible that he had become the victim? His name had been tarred, held up for contempt. I asked if his reputation was important to him. ‘Yes, definitely.’ Well, it would be fair to say it had
