Former All White Michael Groom is bringing a little Brazilian flair to New Zealand sport's perennial poor cousin - and to players' lives in general.
From Auckland to Christchurch, Te Kuiti to Taradale, soccer for young people is being transformed from the structured game traditionally associated with European immigrants to an art form, an expression, an embodiment of freedom and fun – played to the beat of booming Brazilian samba sounds.
Pioneered and now taught with spirit and delight by former All White Michael Groom, futebol de salao – literally “football on a court” – is generating the skills some say could help save New Zealand’s game from more embarrassing lessons such as the one handed out to our national soccer team at the Confederations Cup in France in June.
At a personal level, samba-style soccer has also offered Groom, these days a highly regarded English teacher at exclusive St Paul’s Collegiate in Hamilton, the perfect vehicle to convey his family’s profound understanding, born of harsh experience, of the importance of celebrating life and living it with passion.
In the past 10 years Groom’s wife Angela and youngest son Dylan (10) have both defied death and medical science. With characteristic quiet strength, Angela stared down a rare and aggressive illness with an “only hope” operation, which turned out to be life-saving. Dylan’s shot at life, with five costly operations in France between the ages of six months and six years – each time accompanied by his parents, older sister Jessica and brothers Josh and Ben – is, by contrast, public and well documented.
So, samba soccer – so “positive and reaffirming”, according to Angela Groom – is also an opportunity to put something back into the community that has given the family so much.
To understand it, you need to look at its origins. Brazilians, says Michael Groom, are not fixated with results, but they get them anyway. Their play is expressive, rather than combative. “If you watch even the top players, you’ll see they never lose the capacity to associate their sport with fun. Even their national coach talks about playing happy football and I believe there’s a message in that attitude for us all, whatever we’re doing.”
The events that led to Groom’s current sharing of the samba approach to soccer – and life – began in France in 1999. The family were in Paris for Dylan’s last operation. An accomplished flute player and lover of all music, Groom was snatching a rare moment of enjoyment browsing in a music shop. “There, in the midst of all the trauma in our life, was this CD of Brazilian music. It had an effervescence about it that spoke to me very strongly at that time. On the sleeve, two words jumped out at me – samba and futebol,” he remembers.
Back in New Zealand, just six weeks of the school year remained. The Grooms – whose home had been sacrificed to enable the family to stay together for Dylan’s operations – took up the offer of a caravan at Tairua. Groom transformed into teacher by day and quickly established a routine of schoolwork in the morning and PE in the afternoon. Out came the Brazilian CD from Paris. The Groom children loved the concept, and so did a boy from a neighbouring caravan, whose parents asked Groom to coach him, too.
Once, back in Hamilton, Groom recalls becoming “enamoured” of a Nike advertisement on TV at the time, featuring Brazilian soccer mega-stars such as Ronaldo. “I realised it wasn’t just what I was seeing, it was what I was hearing.”
Then came a moment of clarity, “an epiphany”, he says. “I thought, I feel this affinity and joy with the way the Brazilians play. Why don’t I share that with kids other than my own, and the boy in the next door caravan?”
Groom is now a FIFA-endorsed coach of futebol de salao, but when he began his soccer school, he says he didn’t realise that this formalised version of street soccer was established. “I didn’t think, ‘Brazilian soccer – that looks like a good thing.’ What happened with me is finding out about it reinforced what I had always understood; football in that expressive sense. When I was a youngster, I always watched out for the artists who elevated the game and tried to model myself on them. When I discovered futebol, I felt I had come the full circle.”
He recalls that, as an only child growing up in Hamilton, he got hold of a small ball and “discovered we were good company”. Now, he encourages his samba-soccer students to make friends with the thing they’re kicking. “As with anything, there’s no shortcut. The only way to improve is to be with the ball.”
A recent brochure – written by Groom and produced by a grateful soccer parent – offers this summary of futebol de salao: “This FIFA-approved game is a condensed version of normal football. Played properly, it is fast, exciting and very skilful. All children in Brazil play futebol de salao before playing conventional football. Many of the Brazilian greats attribute their fantastic ball skills directly to the playing of this game.”
Playing in a confined space with the smaller, heavier balls used in futebol calls for greater precision and speed of both body and mind. New Zealand, with its wide-open spaces, hasn’t evolved the street-soccer culture that produces so many international soccer superstars, such as Pele, whose beginnings were, playing barefoot, with an orange for a ball on a crowded street.
“Kiwi kids tend to go to the park and whack the ball as far as they can,” says Groom, who believes that an individual Kiwi soccer style can develop. “I think it’s there. We just have to get past this Kiwi thing of thinking a goal is better than individual brilliance and artistry, which is seen as showing off.”
The Groom’s Alegria (translated: happiness) School of Samba Style Soccer began on a hunch and a whim just over three years ago with a holiday class in Hamilton. Now weeknights, weekends and holidays are taken up with sharing the passion with hundreds of young people in many parts of New Zealand and even, by invitation and all expenses paid, last summer in the US.
Gradually, some soccer administrators and commentators are taking note. Speaking on Radio Sport just after New Zealand’s whitewash at the Confederations Cup, respected former New Zealand Soccer board member and All White Steve Sumner said the Cup games highlighted this country’s comparative lack of soccer skill on the international stage. On the radio he pointed to Groom’s samba-style soccer schools as a means of helping address the issue.
Despite soccer now being played by more school children than any other sport in this country, the numbers participating aren’t translating into a collective lift in ability. “Having watched our national team at the Confederations Cup, you’ve got to say we are still struggling somewhat,” Sumner says. “The touch of the majority of our players was just not good enough at that level.
“The types of skills that Mike appears to be teaching is the sort of football that’s exciting to watch. The point is, will these young players of his come through and make the grade? If they do, I would say, oh boy, look out.”
Soccer parent and administrator John Margetts believes the Groom influence is already apparent. President of the North King Country junior soccer association, Margetts recalls a Waikato/King Country rep game two years ago where he first noticed a group of Hamilton players. “You could see a difference,” says Margetts. “These kids had real flair and ball skills. It stood out they had something extra.”
Margetts burrowed in among other parents on the sideline that day and discovered the common factor was the Alegria School. He tracked down the Grooms and booked them to bring their samba soccer to Te Kuiti. “We can’t get enough of him, really. He adds a whole new dimension to soccer for us. Here in the King Country we have big numbers of children playing soccer – their parents are well-meaning, but most have rugby backgrounds.”
Playing for enjoyment is a direct outcome of young players being exposed to Groom’s coaching, says Margetts. “The music makes all the difference. We have all found even if you make a mistake, the music keeps going, so you do, too.”
Sumner knows all about the Brazilian approach. Captain of John Adshead’s legendary All Whites at the World Cup in 1982, he recalls their pool games. Against Scotland the game “had a nasty element”. Against Russia it was “a bit robust”.
“Then we came up against Brazil and it was like we were on another planet. It was inspiring. Playing against Brazil changed my whole football philosophy. We saw them do some incredible things we would only try on the practice pitch. If what they tried didn’t come off, they didn’t seem concerned. And they never appeared to bag each other for trying something spectacular.”
In his indoor classes, Groom builds on such lessons, showing his students how to do ball-skill tricks with names such as “the Dennilson” and “the Ronnie shuffle”, and encourages their use in the games that always end sessions. Games are paused, music stopped and players publicly admired when they attempt to incorporate the moves into their play. When a goal is scored, that’s the signal for the scoring team to take a rest and the sideline team to get on the court. Not surprisingly, there’s no one taking the score.
However, just as there’s a movement towards street-style soccer in New Zealand, concerned officials in other parts of the world are noting an international skew away from such play. In a recent issue of World Soccer magazine, columnist Paul Gardner bemoaned the increasing impact of traffic, authorities deeming street soccer unsafe, and what he termed “the bourgeoisification of football, its transformation from a spartan working-class male religion to a prosperous middle-class family entertainment”.
“Surely, the structured, expert coaching – to say nothing of the expensive facilities – of an academy must produce better players than the chaos of the streets?” Gardner wrote. “Not so, it seems … A recent UFEA forum on youth soccer concluded that the disappearance of street soccer was so damaging to player development that it has ‘to be compensated by new structures’.”
Groom doesn’t know where his version of street soccer is heading. It is, he candidly admits, getting bigger than they had imagined. Although he is aware of negativity from “some parts of the soccer establishment”, he is unconcerned. “What I think they fail to see is our objectives extend beyond soccer. If a kid can leap and
experience the joy and freedom of movement and expression with a football, it’s not just a soccer thing. What I understand with children is, if you can expose them to a world of possibilities, you can’t do anything more vital for them.”
A good result
Dylan Groom was five months old and near death when doctors finally diagnosed his condition – a rare malformation of blood vessels in the brain. It was, they told Dylan’s parents, a case “way out of our league”. They held little hope for his survival.
But, on the day that Dylan was to be discharged from hospital, a South African neurosurgeon working in Auckland offered a glimmer of hope: the name of a French neuroradiologist he had seen working some years before.
Mountains were moved, contacts made, medical data exchanged, and so began Dylan’s high-profile international medical saga. The Grooms appealed for public donations to fund operations and treatment in Paris for Dylan – five times between 1993 and 1999.
In the Waikato, Dylan and his mother Angela are still recognised as a result of the years of publicity. “Dylan would not be here if it wasn’t for the generosity of the people in the Waikato,” says Angela Groom. “We do recognise that and we are deeply grateful.”