Lamin and the Football Match: Kick Off
We were lost again.
Well… actually… strictly speaking… that’s not true.
We weren’t lost.
But Lamin didn’t know where we were going.
It was 14th April 2018 and we were looking for a football pitch.
By we, I mean myself, Lamin Barrow and Damon — charity trustee, teaching colleague, friend and, on this particular occasion, fellow passenger on a flight we were supposed to be catching later that evening.
And by football pitch, I mean a large rectangular patch of orange-brown earth which, quite frankly, described an alarming number of places in The Gambia.
Somewhere among them was the right one.
Lamin was due to play for Sankandi, his home village team, against a local team from Busumbala.
I didn’t actually know it was Busumbala until I started researching this chapter eight years later and began pestering Lamin with questions. Busumbala is, of course, rather important to me now. It is the village where Building Futures in The Gambia eventually built its nursery school.
It’s probably just as well I didn’t know that in 2018.
I wouldn’t have known who to support.
Gambians seem perfectly comfortable having a first team and a second team. An Englishman, however, is generally expected to choose one football club and then spend the rest of his life regretting it.
But more of that later.
For now, we had a football match to find.
It was supposed to start at around 5.00pm.
I use the word supposed quite deliberately.
Five o’clock in The Gambia can sometimes be less an appointment and more an opening suggestion.
This presented a slight problem.
At approximately 9.30pm, an aircraft was due to leave Banjul International Airport for England. Damon and I were hoping to be on it.
I have learned over the years that Banjul International is not an airport where you want to stroll in at the last minute looking relaxed. Three hours’ leeway is reassuring. Two hours is acceptable. Anything much below that begins to encourage unnecessary interest in the clock.
So the arithmetic was straightforward.
Match starts at five.
Ninety minutes of football, plus half-time, takes us to somewhere around quarter to seven.
The airport was perhaps fifteen minutes away.
Leave immediately after the final whistle and we could be checking in by seven, luggage handed over, formalities completed and Julbrew in hand with a comfortable couple of hours before take-off.
It was all perfectly manageable.
Providing nothing went wrong.
However, 5.00pm was fast approaching and we still hadn’t found the football pitch.
Lamin had stopped the taxi several times and disappeared off in search of directions. On more than one occasion we became briefly excited by the sight of groups of young men wandering purposefully in roughly the same direction.
Footballers!
Unfortunately, they turned out to be footballers taking part in an entirely different competition, in an entirely different place, which was of absolutely no use to us whatsoever.
Eventually, with five o’clock almost upon us, and after bumping our way along several winding sandy tracks, we found the correct orangey-brown patch of earth.
It was hardly Wembley Stadium. The pitch sat in a broad, open area of pale sand and dust, with low compounds and simple buildings scattered around the edges rather than crowding in on it. Patches of scrub and long grass filled the gaps, and a few large trees rose above the rooftops, including one magnificent spreading tree that seemed to dominate the whole scene. Beyond the pitch, the landscape opened out further still, giving the whole place a slightly improvised, edge-of-the-village feel.
Most importantly, we knew we were in the right place because three members of the Sankandi team were waiting there.
Three.
With Lamin, that made four.
This was a full village league match, so unless Sankandi had introduced a revolutionary new tactical system involving seven invisible players, we were still some way short of a team.
And it was nearly five o’clock.
Have I mentioned Gambian time before?
Oh yes.
See Lamin and the Kora Player.
So we had no full Sankandi team.
There was no sign whatsoever of the Busumbala squad.
And Damon and I had an aeroplane to catch.
Lamin didn’t seem overly concerned.
Or, indeed, concerned at all.
There wasn’t much else to do while we waited, so I took the opportunity to admire the football pitch.
It was a large, rectangular and, to be fair, impressively flat expanse of orange-brown sand. And there were no towering termite mounds situated at inappropriate locations – the goal mouth, for example. That’s always a good thing.
I also admired the goalposts.
Genuine white Premier League goalposts were clearly regarded as an unnecessary extravagance. Instead, there were two slim tree trunks for uprights and a long length of rope stretched between them as a crossbar.
Cheap, ingenious, practical and effective.
It wasn’t quite “jumpers for goalposts”, but it certainly belonged to the same school of football engineering.
While we waited for the rest of Sankandi to materialise, I decided to practise my Mandinka on Lamin’s teammates.
I began confidently enough.
I be dii? — How are you?
Suumoolu lee? — How is everyone at home?
Kori tanante? — Hope there is no trouble?
So far, so good.
Then, feeling rather pleased with myself, I decided to have a little fun with them.
N be sabati Sankandi.
I live in Sankandi.
This caused some confusion.
N be sabati Barrow Kunda.
I live in the Barrow compound.
This caused rather more.
From my point of view, this was hilarious.
From theirs, it was increasingly difficult to tell whether the Englishman in front of them had misunderstood Mandinka completely or had simply taken English eccentricity a little too far.
They knew perfectly well that I did not live in Sankandi. They had presumably never seen me emerging from Barrow Kunda in the morning carrying a toothbrush.
Things deteriorated further when I told them that Damon was my aunt.
The Mandinka word for aunt is binki. Delightful.
However, neither Damon nor Lamin’s Sankandi friends found this remotely humorous.
Suddenly, my grasp of the Mandinka language began to feel a little more tenuous.
Fortunately, before I could accidentally marry anybody, insult somebody’s grandmother or announce that I owned several goats, more of Lamin’s teammates began to arrive.
Lamin started handing out the football strips and my brief attempt at international diplomacy was brought to a merciful end.
The minutes continued to tick by but, gradually and reassuringly, the rest of the Sankandi village team finally appeared and began pulling on their kit.
Lamin has supported Aston Villa for as long as I’ve known him — and, apparently, for longer than that. So this wasn’t a case of me converting him. If anything, we simply discovered that we were both already suffering from the same condition.
It occurs to me, as I write this, that I have never actually asked Lamin why he supports Aston Villa.
I’m sure there is a perfectly good reason.
One day I’ll find out and report back.
So it will probably come as no great surprise to learn that the entire Sankandi team were now being handed Aston Villa away strips.
There was a reason for this.
Over the years, groups of students from Birmingham Newman University had visited The Gambia on expeditions led by charity trustee and now retired lecturer Mark Chidler. One of those students was Luke, who later became a supporter of Building Futures in The Gambia and, after leaving university, went to work for Aston Villa Football Club.
This proved extremely useful.
Luke was able to obtain donations from Villa which, rather wonderfully, included complete football strips.
And this is how, on a dusty village football pitch in Busumbala, The Gambia, the entire Sankandi team came to be dressed in gleaming white Aston Villa away kits.
Lamin was naturally very pleased about this.
He proudly wore the white Villa strip himself, although, mysteriously, he had somehow acquired a pair of purple-and-white hooped socks from a completely different Aston Villa kit.
An entire team dressed identically was clearly taking uniformity a little too far.
Lamin had to be different.
And so there we were.
The Sankandi team was assembled.
The Sankandi team was fully kitted out.
Lamin was ready.
The goalposts were standing.
The rope remained reassuringly horizontal.
There was just one small problem.
We had nobody to play.
No Busumbala team.
Not one member of the Busumbala squad.
And time was ticking by.
It was now gone 5.30pm.
Damon and I had a plane to England to catch.
We were beginning to feel distinctly nervous.
Lamin continued to exhibit the relaxed demeanour of a man whose evening plans did not involve an international departure lounge.
We waited.
Football is taken very seriously in The Gambia. The same is true, from everything I have seen, across much of West Africa.
I’d hesitate to make grand claims about the whole continent because Africa is a very large place and I have not conducted any kind of extensive survey.
But in The Gambia, football is everywhere.
And sometimes I mean that quite literally.
I’ve seen football played on dusty village pitches, beside roads and in school grounds.
I’ve even seen games played in the Atlantic shallows at Bakau, where the incoming tide merely appears to add another tactical complication.
And, in my own experience at least, most of the football conversations I have had have been with Gambian men.
I don’t say that as a grand sociological statement. It is simply what I have observed. In fifteen years of travelling to The Gambia, I had never once seen a Gambian woman kick a football.
Not once.
Then, in January 2026, that fifteen-year sequence came to a sudden and very pleasing end.
Hold that thought.
I’ll come back to it in the next chapter.
For now, suffice to say that Gambians like their football.
I’m not going to say football is a religion in West Africa because that is a very well-worn cliché.
But if the Beautiful Game was a religion in Africa’s smallest country, it would have a very LARGE congregation.
Only a few days into my first visit to The Gambia in 2011, I realised just how deeply football had worked its way into everyday life.
Sometimes it was a large, organised match with proper teams and a crowd. Sometimes it was half a dozen children on a patch of sand enthusiastically chasing an elderly, battered football which appeared deflated in every sense of the word.
Wherever there was a bit of open ground and something vaguely spherical to kick, a football match seemed capable of breaking out.
I also quickly realised that football was an excellent icebreaker.
Ask somebody which team they supported and, more often than not, you had a conversation.
I can still remember my first football-related exchange with startling clarity.
We were visiting the laterite quarry at Bafoloto.
Laterite, for the uninitiated, is the iron-rich red earth that gives so many Gambian roads and tracks their familiar orange-brown colour. For years, Bafoloto Quarry was one of the places where it was dug out on an industrial scale, often by men and women working in punishing daytime heat with very little shade. These days, even that has changed. Much of the old quarry has disappeared beneath new compounds and houses — a reminder that progress comes to The Gambia too, though not always in ways that serve the people who live there best.
But in 2011, the quarry was still there.
And so were the miners.
For a few dalasi, they were usually happy to talk to visitors and demonstrate how they worked. If a particularly curious visitor was feeling brave — or reckless — they might even be invited down into one of the deep holes to peer into the orange-brown gloom of the tunnels below.
I never considered this an especially tempting offer.
I remember being told, with what sounded suspiciously like reassurance, that “only three” men had died in tunnel collapses during the previous few years.
Only three.
This did not produce in me the urge to go underground.
I remained very firmly on the surface, in daylight, where the sky was visible and the earth was not directly above my head.
A group of us teachers had spent some time listening to one of the miners explain his work and, as we were leaving, I decided to try my newly discovered conversational shortcut.
I approached him.
“Which football team do you support?”
He looked at me blankly.
I wasn’t entirely sure he had understood.
“Football team? Do you have a favourite football team?”
Realisation spread across his face.
He grinned.
“Arsenal.”
I reacted as any responsible Aston Villa supporter would.
I shook my head slowly.
“No. No. No. No. No.”
I even wagged a finger at him for emphasis.
The miner smiled, although he now looked faintly concerned that he had somehow failed a test he hadn’t known he was taking.
“I also support Real Madrid,” he said. “They are my second team.”
He looked at me hopefully.
I saw my chance.
“You should support Aston Villa. Aston Villa should be your second team.”
He grinned again and thought about it.
“Okay. Maybe Aston Villa will be my second team.”
Excellent.
International diplomacy had been achieved.
I shook his hand. In my palm were a few dalasi for his pocket.
He looked at me.
“Thank you.”
There was genuine gratitude in his face, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by it.
Then I walked away with the rest of the group and left him to return to work.
I took three important lessons from that conversation:
- Lots of Gambians support Arsenal.
And I mean LOTS.
- Gambians will quite happily support a second team, often another major European club.
- With a sufficiently generous supply of dalasi, it might just be possible to convert the entire population of The Gambia to Aston Villa.
I have yet to cost this properly.
As I’ve already mentioned, the quarry has now largely gone, replaced by compounds and houses.
But there was always a problem with that land.
The quarry sat low, in an area where the water table was high.
“When the rains come, it will flood,” I remember Lamin saying.
And that is the part that stays with me.
The quarry has gone.
So too has the livelihood it provided for the men and women who worked there.
In its place are homes built on land that is vulnerable to flooding during the rainy season.
Which makes Bafoloto, for me at least, a fairly sobering example of the fact that change and progress are not always the same thing.
Perhaps Arsenal’s most passionate Gambian supporter was a man called Muhammed Nyang — or Mo, as everyone knew him.
Mo was an official tourist guide, which is how I first came to know him. He was there right at the beginning of my Gambian adventures, one of the guides who worked closely with Birmingham Newman University during its student and teacher expeditions to The Gambia.
He was also a good friend of charity trustee Mark Chidler and, later, played an important part in Building Futures in The Gambia settling on Busumbala Village as the location for its proposed nursery school.
Mo knew an extraordinary amount about The Gambia.
History. Villages. Culture. Religion. Politics. Customs. People.
He seemed to have absorbed the country by osmosis.
He was a devout Muslim and, in his own time, would write down verses from the Qur’an that he had memorised.
And he could talk.
Blimey, he could talk.
If you genuinely wanted to understand The Gambia, Mo was the sort of guide you wanted beside you. He would talk, explain, inform, educate and then, having apparently finished, remember another twenty minutes’ worth.
For him, passing on what he knew was effortless.
Unfortunately, he supported Arsenal.
No-one is perfect.
I had many good-natured arguments with him about the relative merits of Aston Villa and Arsenal. Regrettably, the historical evidence was usually on his side.
That never stopped me.
The football banter became part of the friendship, and it was a very pleasant way to pass the time.
Sadly, Mo died in 2025.
His final years were difficult. He became very ill and was increasingly unable to work. Lamin Barrow helped him by driving him to and from hospital appointments and then taking him to buy whatever medication had been prescribed.
During those last years, Mo suffered a succession of serious health problems. He had pneumonia-like symptoms, a severe snake bite, and an illness which may or may not have been cancer. He also believed that a curse had been placed upon him by a family he had intended to marry into.
Whatever the precise combination of causes, there was an awful lot for one man to endure.
In the end, it was too much.
Mo is much missed by those of us who knew him.
And The Gambia is a quieter place without him.
At this point, you might be wondering if the Busumbala players have turned up yet.
Don’t worry.
They haven’t.
You haven’t missed anything.
We’re still waiting.
And Damon and I still have a plane to catch.
If you’re in The Gambia and there is a football match you desperately need to watch, do not panic. There are plenty of ways to see your favourite team.
Look out for a Video Club.
Now, for those of us who lived through the 1980s and 90s in the Western world, a video club was somewhere you went to rent the latest blockbuster on VHS — or Betamax, if you were feeling adventurous.
Not so in The Gambia.
Or, indeed, much of West Africa.
A video club is where you go to watch football.
They’re generally quite easy to find. Wander around for long enough and sooner or later you’ll come across a chalkboard outside a small building advertising the day’s fixtures.
Chelsea at three.
Barcelona at five.
Real Madrid at eight.
This will almost certainly be a video club.
For a few dalasi — or whatever the local currency happens to be — you can go inside, find yourself a space on one of the wooden benches and watch the match with everybody else.
Inside, the arrangements can vary enormously. There might be an elderly television in one corner and another television underneath it which apparently retired several years ago.
Seating generally consists of long wooden benches arranged with all the ergonomic sophistication of a medieval church.
Nobody seems particularly bothered by this.
Sometimes there aren’t any benches at all.
Standing room only.
And sometimes, if you were very lucky indeed, the match would not be confined to a television at all. It would be projected onto a wall at a size more usually associated with international summits or PowerPoint presentations.
On one particular occasion, during an England international, Lamin naturally treated this as an opportunity to pose in front of it as if he had been invited on as guest pundit.
The important thing is that the football is on.
Or, at least, it is until the electricity goes off.
Power cuts add an extra dimension to watching football in West Africa. In England, the principal anxiety is usually whether your team will concede in the final minute. In The Gambia, there is the additional possibility that the entire match will disappear halfway through because somebody has temporarily removed the electricity.
If the power comes back quickly, everybody resumes watching.
If it doesn’t, everybody waits.
Football teaches patience.
A rather different version of the same experience can be found in the more touristy parts of The Gambia.
On the Senegambia Strip, for example, there is far less need to hunt for a chalkboard nailed to a wall or wonder whether the television in the corner survived the last power cut. Bars and restaurants know exactly what their customers want and, if there is a Premier League match on, somebody somewhere will almost certainly be showing it.
Reo’s became one of our regular places.
Inside, the football experience is rather less rustic.
There are several large screens on various walls.
There is a pool table.
There is a proper bar.
There are bottles of whatever the local brew happens to be within easy reach.
And, most importantly, Aston Villa is considerably easier to see.
On one occasion, I was able to watch Villa on three screens at once.
This felt reassuring.
If they were going to disappoint me, I wanted to make absolutely certain I didn’t miss it.
Reo’s was also one of those places where football became more than simply watching a match. It became part of the ongoing banter between Lamin and me — and, occasionally, between Lamin and my friends back in England.
Because one afternoon I realised that the opportunity to send Lamin-centred football messages home was simply too good to waste.
I present to you both the text and the video messages sent back to my friends in England.
To my friend Colin — a lifelong Birmingham City supporter — we sent this:
Me: Lamin, which is the best team on the planet?
Lamin: Villa.
Me: And Lamin, have you ever heard of Birmingham City?
Lamin: I’ve never heard of that team.
To my friend Marcus — a lifelong Manchester United supporter — we sent another.
Me: Lamin, what do you think about Manchester United?
Lamin: Rubbish.
Short.
Concise.
Difficult to misinterpret.
And finally, to Damon — teacher, charity trustee and, having been born in Newcastle, inevitably a Newcastle United supporter — we sent:
Me: And Lamin, what do you think about Newcastle?
Lamin: Why are people supporting Newcastle?
Lamin’s delivery in this particular video is magnificent.
He looks genuinely puzzled.
Not mocking.
Not mischievous.
Simply baffled that anybody, anywhere, had apparently made such a curious life choice.
I suspect that one day Lamin will be the star of his own sitcom.
Other ways of watching televised football are also likely to present themselves.
On one occasion, I watched an incredibly important final on Lamin’s mobile phone.
But more of that in the next chapter.
And, on another occasion, I literally went to new heights to watch a game of football.
Lamin has a large group of friends who all learned to drive taxis together. Every year or so, they gather for a catch-up, some food and, inevitably, whatever football happens to be on television.
In 2024, I was lucky enough to be invited along.
The meeting took place in a television repair shop.
Actually, that’s not true.
It took place on the roof of a television repair shop — surrounded by wires, aerials and assorted pieces of discarded televisual equipment.
It was oddly enjoyable to be sitting with a large group of mostly non-English-speaking taxi drivers on the roof of a building enjoying a splendid view across Serekunda.
But these are the benefits of travelling with Lamin.
In a small block building on the roof, there was a television showing a football match.
It’s a bit difficult to describe the televisual set-up, but I’ll have a go anyway.
Imagine somebody had emptied the contents of a television repair shop onto one wooden cabinet and then somehow persuaded it all to work.
There were screens, speakers, boxes, wires, an old radio-cassette player and at least two televisions which appeared to have retired some years earlier.
It looked less like a home entertainment system and more like the aftermath of an argument in an electronics shop.
But the football was on.
Which was all that mattered.
And that, really, is the point.
Wherever you are in The Gambia, somebody will usually find a way to put the football on.
And nobody will ask you to take out three separate streaming subscriptions first.
At this point, I think we need to get back to the Sankandi football match.
Because there are developments.
You may recall that Damon, Lamin, myself and what now appeared to be the entire Sankandi footballing population were waiting for the Busumbala team to turn up.
The Sankandi players were all wearing Aston Villa kits.
Obviously.
The fact that Lamin Barrow had now added Kit Manager to his already extensive list of job titles probably had something to do with this.
Damon and I, meanwhile, still had a plane to catch.
Fortunately, with around three and three-quarter hours to go before take-off, the Busumbala team finally appeared in the distance… wandering towards us without a care in the world, as if kick-off times and international departures were merely vague suggestions rather than actual deadlines.
Finally.
I watched as both teams ambled onto the pitch and arranged themselves into something resembling a football formation.
It was now 6.00pm.
Three and a half hours until our flight to England.
Plenty of time.
Probably.
And so, despite the fact that an aeroplane would be waiting for us later that evening, our taxi driver was standing in the middle of a dusty orange football pitch, wearing an Aston Villa strip and apparently without a care in the world.
Another one of the Gambians on the pitch had obviously drawn the short straw and been elected referee.
Or perhaps he was simply the only man in the area who owned a whistle.
He stepped towards the centre spot.
Or what passed for one.
A slightly more worn patch of sand.
He put the whistle to his lips.
And blew.
Kick off!
.
..
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Continued in Chapter 19 – Lamin and the Football Match: Full Time
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..
…
But before I go, here’s a little out-take from Reo’s Bar, where Lamin briefly forgets which football team he is supposed to be insulting and nearly says Aston Villa instead of Newcastle.
Even the professionals get it wrong occasionally.
Read the next chapter
Lamin and the Football Match: Full Time
Coming soon…
Read the Introduction to ‘Travels With Lamin’ here:
👉Travels With Lamin – An Introduction | Building Futures in the Gambia
Find all the other chapters here:
👉Travels With Lamin: Stories from The Gambia and West Africa | Building Futures in the Gambia
Book Lamin and his taxi here:
👉Lamin Barrow Taxis – The Gambia’s Number One Taxi Driver
And find out more about Lamin’s work with BFiG Busumbala Nursery School here:
👉 Building Futures in The Gambia
And Discover the Gambia here:
👉 Discover The Gambia | Culture, Food, Music, Places & Stories
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