Millwall’s Matthew Briggs rediscovers his roots with Guyana success
Nick Ames, Tuesday 14 April 2015 14.02 BST, Source
Matthew Briggs, left, beats Chelsea's Didier Drogba to the ball during his playing days with Fulham in 2010. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
It did not take long after arriving in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, for Matthew Briggs to understand the confluence of heart and head that had decided his future in international football had also given rise to something more powerful.
“My mum’s brother, my uncle – I’d never met him before,” says the Millwall full-back who is on loan at Colchester United. “He’d never been able to come over to England. But now he saw me for the first time and it was very emotional, he just grabbed me and held me for five minutes. I was in tears there.”
Briggs had not visited the South American country, which has borders with Brazil and Venezuela but is anglophone and part of the Caribbean, before being selected for the squad to face Grenada in March, but it already felt close enough to home. “I grew up with my mum and my grandma, who was born there,” the 24-year-old says. “So it was a very Guyanese household – the food we’d eat, the culture, even down to the accents. It was just what I was used to.”
This was in south London and Briggs would not object if anybody pointed out Guyana were not originally in his thoughts as a football option. On 13 May 2007, he became the youngest player to appear in the Premier League, coming on as a substitute for Fulham against Middlesbrough at the age of 16 years and 68 days. It is a record that still stands and while young players are sometimes blooded in order for a manager to make a point or curry favour, Lawrie Sanchez had seen in him what England Under-16 coaches had already spotted, and what every age group beneath the senior set-up would take a first-hand look at in the next four years.
Not everything has worked out since and via several loan spells and an injury that laid him low for the whole of last season, Briggs left Fulham for the Den in the summer having played for them on only 28 further occasions. With his two Under‑21 caps in 2011 a fading memory, it was time for something different.
“Guyana asked me to take part in the World Cup qualifiers a couple of years ago but I was around the England set-up then and at that age I was thinking I wanted to push on and play for them,” he says. “But as time passed I thought: ‘Why not play for Guyana?’ It would mean senior international football and a chance to represent the country my family is from, and I knew how proud my grandma, Daphne, would be. I was close to her, but lost her quite a while ago. It wasn’t a hard decision to make.”
So Briggs accepted the offer of a getting-to-know-you trip for the Grenada game, tweeting “This is for you nan” as he departed. He was joined by a familiar face. Neil Danns has been a competent operator in the Football League – primarily in the Championship for clubs such as Crystal Palace, Leicester and Blackburn – for a decade and at 32 received a first call-up of his own. The two had been team-mates before, their loan spells at Bristol City coinciding in 2012-13.
They were far from the first recognisable names to have been enlisted by the Golden Jaguars. The Cort brothers, Leon and Carl, won six caps apiece this decade and Ricky Shakes, formerly of Swindon and Brentford, has been a regular too. The three contributed to a minor sensation in those Concacaf qualifiers for the last World Cup when Shakes and Leon Cort scored to help them beat Trinidad & Tobago and reach the region’s second group stage.
Things have veered off course since: the local football federation president, Christopher Mathias, controversially decided to ban overseas-based players in what was offered as a cost-cutting measure, and with infighting dragging the sport into chaos a Fifa normalisation committee was appointed to run football in Guyana when Mathias was removed last October. With that episode having drawn to a close, the squad that set up camp in March appears to have been a happy one. “You wonder what the players will be like, whether the local guys will be a bit envious of you or think: ‘Who’s this guy coming from England?’” says Briggs.
“Dannsy and I are humble guys, though, and it wasn’t like that. I don’t think they expected us to be as we were. Chris Nurse, the captain, told me this is the best Guyana squad he’s been involved with – the best squad harmony. He said that in the past players had come over from different countries but the local players hadn’t really taken to them and there was some segregation in the group. This time everyone really stuck together and the atmosphere around the dressing room was brilliant.”
The buzz peaked when Briggs walked out at Providence Stadium, which was built for the 2007 Cricket World Cup, for the first time. “It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” he says. “Just amazing. I like Caribbean music myself but to be running out of the tunnel and they’re blazing the tunes out … it was so enjoyable. The game itself went well for me. I spent most of my time in the attacking third and we won 2-0, although it should have been at least six. In the end we just saw it out but Dannsy and I both put in solid performances.”
Briggs’ commitment would be rubber-stamped if he appeared competitively against Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in a World Cup qualifying tie this June and he is keen to emphasise this will not be an ephemeral relationship.
“I used this friendly to experience it for myself but I enjoyed it so much that I can definitely say I’ll be going back,” he says. “It was an honour and such a great feeling to hear people on the street saying ‘thank you for coming to represent us’ and ‘welcome home’.
“I think we can put together a decent enough team to challenge for a World Cup place. Ryan Fredericks [of Tottenham] can play and he’s thinking about it, Callum Harriott [the Charlton winger] too. If we can get guys like this in and get football back up and running as it should be in Guyana, with the right training facilities, I don’t see why we can’t be successful.”
It would be a different kind of success from that which Briggs envisaged eight years ago but one whose nourishing qualities might extend far beyond adornments to a football career.