For a recent game 800 Faroese more than 5 per cent of the population flew to Scotland to cheer

For a recent game, 800 Faroese (more than 5 per cent of the population) flew to Scotland to cheer on their boys They lost to the home team 2-1, a respectable score Things are improving. The party lasted for days.Football has been good to the Faroes, and so the Faroese are fanatically devoted to football They no longer think losing by fewer than 10 goals is good They now aim to lose by no more than four. They may not have played a glorious role in a big war or hosted peace conferences or produced Bjork, but they weren’t a far-flung bit of Denmark any more; they were the FAROE ISLANDS, a real country with a real football team. The Faroe Islands had beaten Austria 1-0 in their first real international match.It was nation-defining Something no one could ever take away from them It had given the Faroes credibility on the world stage. Torkil Nielsen, a timber merchant, scored for the Faroes.For the remainder of the game, every Faroese held his breath The seconds ticked, slowly, slowly Some couldn’t bear the stress and had to look away At last the clock ran out. Goalkeeper Jens Martin Knudsen, a fork-lift truck driver in real life, was managing to keep the big-shot Austrians at bay The Faroese team gained confidence They pushed their advantage Then the impossible happened. The Faroese national journalists were out in full force, all dozen or so of them The entire country tensed for battle The Austrians were nowhere to be seen.Then it was game time The country listened in, cringing Ten minutes went by Then 20 No one scored It was a miracle Better than anyone could imagine.

In the days before the Big Game, the Faroese studied the pitch and tried to focus, vacillating between embarrassment, excitement and horror. So the Faroese decided that if they lost by anything less than 10 goals they could consider the game a success. Fans who travelled to Austria to cheer on their boys (and cousins and nephews…) joked cheerfully that they were there to help keep count of goals against. But that didn’t stop the team captain from recording a football anthem In Faroese. It was a hit.The Austrians declared that they would win by 10 goals. Not easy, since, unlike the professional Austrian players, the Faroese were all amateurs.

There was a postman, a baker, a bank clerk, several mechanics, and a quality control expert from the local fish plant The team was nervous, to say the least. With the support of all the Nordic countries, the Faroe Islands joined Fifa. Their first official match was to be on 12 September 1990, against Austria. Since the Faroes didn’t have a proper pitch, the game would be played in a neutral country, Sweden.The boys trained hard. Rumour has it, they played mostly to keep the soldiers too busy to steal their women. By the end of the war, football was a national obsession.By the Seventies, the Faroes, which have home rule from Denmark, wanted to field a national team In 1988, it happened. You would hope they founded their second one soon afterwards, or else matches might have been a bit boring.

Faroese football really took off during the Second World War. Stopped from practising their traditional livelihood (fishing) by circling Nazi U-boats, the young men found themselves playing endless football games against the British soldiers posted to the Faroes. Personally, I think the Faroese- to-be saw a black-and-white sheep on a wind-swept mountainside, mistook it for a football, and jumped ship.The Faroese founded their first football club in 1892. The Faroese will tell you that all the smart Norsemen got off in the Faroe Islands, leaving the dumb ones to continue on to Iceland.The Icelanders say that the seasick ones got off in the Faroes, leaving the strong ones to travel on to Iceland. Your basic land of astounding beauty, the Faroes are all wind- swept mountains, breathtaking cliffs, sheep, wave-lashed beaches, more sheep, picturesque turf-roofed fishing villages and 43,000 football-obsessed sheep owners.Irish monks lived there before – presumably punishing themselves for some terrible sin they had committed – but the Faroes were settled in earnest only in AD825, by Norsemen on their way west towards Iceland (and Newfoundland). Well, Faroese football fans make us look as devoted to our national sport as my vegetarian grandmother is to duck a l’orange.
Let me explain.

First, where are the Faroe Islands? Draw a triangle with Norway, Iceland and the Shetlands at the corners, and you’ll find the 18 Faroe Islands smack-dab in the middle of that frigid, North Atlantic triangle. But she was ignoring the lamb and potatoes congealing on her plate. Instead, she was consuming the event being shown on the large colour TV placed to the left of her chair. Lowering his voice, the Man of the House murmured reverentially: “You see, it’s Football Night.”

You may think Brits take football seriously. THE MAN of the House looked somewhat abashed He glanced over at the Woman of the House.