Soccer team causes surprise by coming home

Soccer team causes surprise by coming home
Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:28am EDT

FREETOWN (Reuters) - A boys' soccer team from Sierra Leone won silver at a tournament in Sweden, but were hailed as champions in their poor West African homeland -- because they all came home.

Sierra Leone is bottom of the U.N. development rankings and its athletes frequently vanish when traveling abroad for sporting fixtures in order to seek asylum, meaning many Western countries now simply refuse to let them in.

"It's rare for a whole team of Sierra Leoneans to go abroad and come back," Kweku Lisk, legal adviser to their club, FC Johansen, told reporters in the capital Freetown Friday.

"It goes to show what Sierra Leone can do when it puts its mind to it. We have managed to stick a feather in the cap for the country," he said.

More: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL828130220080811

Cross posted in LBN: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=102