A globetrotting playing career took Brent Sancho from Portland to Priestfield, Ross County to Rochester Rhinos but, speaking to the former Trinidad and Tobago defender, there really is only one place to start: that unforgettable night in Nuremberg at the 2006 World Cup.
For 82 minutes Sancho and Dennis Lawrence, now the manager of the Caribbean nation, had held firm against Sven-Göran Eriksson’s England, until Peter Crouch pulled on Sancho’s dreadlocks for leverage and headed beyond Shaka Hislop. Steven Gerrard sealed victory in stoppage time, by which point Crouch had established himself as public enemy No 1.
“It was bodily assault,” Sancho says, laughing. “Becks hanged up the cross and I saw him [Crouch] so I tried to back into him so he couldn’t jump. But he used my hair, my shoulder and every other part of my body to get over me. I was laid on the ground, looking at the referee amazed he did not give a foul and he gave me that look as if to say: ‘Listen, buddy. There’s no chance I’m going to give that call here. You’re tiny Trinidad against mighty England.’”
It was a laboured England performance. Sancho rows back to the moment when Wayne Rooney was introduced off the bench to help stir the team. “Eriksson was a very cool customer, but you could hear the panic in his voice when he was giving instructions,” Sancho recalls. “I didn’t feel they could beat us. You could sense their concern and they were worried. We were very aware of the enormity of playing against Lampard, Stevie Gerrard and those guys, but we were confident we could compete. We were over the moon to make our tiny country so proud.”
After going close to reaching the 1974 and 1990 tournaments, Trinidad became the smallest nation to qualify for a World Cup, until Iceland superseded them last year. Sancho says it was “arguably the biggest occasion” in the country’s history. As archetypal underdogs, Trinidad were sometimes ridiculed. Sancho recalls a question by an English journalist before they blunted Sweden’s front two of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Henrik Larsson in a 0-0 draw in their Group B opener. Sancho was watching the press conference at the hotel with some teammates.
“They said: ‘Seeing as cricket is a popular sport in Trinidad, do you expect to lose by a cricket score?’ I remember going back on the bus after, and the then prime minister [Patrick Manning] called us on speakerphone to congratulate us. You could hear all the pandemonium behind him, all the cabinet ministers celebrating.”
