Taking football to our people

By KEVIN PAMBA
JOHN Kapi Natto is taking the crusade for soccer’s equitable growth in Papua New Guinea to the grassroots around the country.
Last Saturday he was in Madang with his message of change for soccer to be a game to be for everyone around the country and not restricted to 12 or 18 associations.
In his words, football management in PNG today was “marginalized” to a few associations and this must change for the largest country in the Oceania region (outside New Zealand and Australia) with a growing population.
Kapi Natto’s Madang trip followed on from his foray into another soccer heartland, the Morobean capital, Lae and Port Moresby the previous week.
He reported to the crowd at Madang’s Laiwaden Oval that his next stop is the New Guinea Islands regional capital, Kokopo, where he is being invited to speak to the football faithful in the islands.
Kapi Natto is also going to venture into his homeland in the highlands where his family business is set to open a mini stadium for the Hekari Football Association in his native Kutubu in Southern Highlands next
month.
The Madang trip was bit of a treat for soccer fans and special for the man who founded the semi-professional National Soccer League (NSL) with five teams against all odds and critics in 2006.
Kapi Natto and his wife Vonnie brought their beloved champion team Hekari United FC who treated fans in the tourism resort town to a friendly match with Team Madang, the select side for the PNG Games in Kimbe in November.
While a star-studded Hekari predictably won the match 3-0 in a rain-soaked Laiwaden, the catch for the day was Kapi Natto’s message of “play fair” in the management of football in PNG. The soccer fans came to hear his story behind the story, is it were, for a change in direction for football in the largest nation in Oceania from 2017 onwards.
Kapi Natto said Madang has a special place in his heart for a number of reasons.
Firstly, Madang under the leadership of football stalwarts like the late Peter Angasa and John Gringo among others gave him the support to start NSL which led him to sponsor Madang FC to be in the semi-professional competition in
2006 and 2007.
Secondly, Madang provided the largest crowd ever recorded in an NSL match when Hekari played Madang FC in 2015.
Thirdly, he said Madang is the heartland of soccer and people love their football dearly. This is an attribute he has always acknowledged and advocated while in the northern coastal town – that it must be harnessed and football be made a household brand in this town and region.
Kapi Natto told the Laiwaden crowd that the well-publicised events leading up to the elective congress of PNG Football Association in Kimbe last December that had only six officials participating and electing David Chung to retain
his position as President was the last straw.
He gave a snapshot of the chronology of events that took place before the Kimbe congress and subsequent dramas that have unfolded including the latest where the OFC Ethics Committee has invited him to face them for bringing football in PNG to disrepute.
Kapi Natto said the invitation by the OFC Ethics Committee is an opportunity for him to go and put everything on the table – that it had nothing to do with personal interests or motivation but that football must win at the end.
He said numerous communications about the issues in PNG football sent by him to FIFA headquarters in Zurich has yielded no response and the meeting with the  OFC Ethics Committee gives him that opportunity to talk straight about why he has taken up the fight for football in PNG.
He added that if his only was interest was in the perks and privileges that FIFA offers to executives of national associations including regular travels overseas and allowances and executive class trips to World Cup matches, he would have remained as vice president of PNGFA.
Going forward, Kapi Natto said the rival Football Federation PNG (FFPNG) that he and the 12 football association presidents are embarking on would be launched next month and it will be a decentralized entity and will work through four confederations representing the four regions of PNG.
Each confederate will have its own management structures and regional competitions that feeds from provincial and district competitions and at the top will be “battle of the four confederations”.
The aim of the structure and concept proposed by FFPNG is to bring football down to where it matters at the level of the ordinary people in the districts and villages.
Kapi Natto said the call is with the Presidents of the 12 associations that gave him the mandate to stand up against the status quo last December.
The native of the Kutubu oilfields said he grew up playing soccer in Kopkop, New Ireland with his father Kapi Natto Senior who was a Correction Service Officer there in the early 1970s and started the famous Tarangau club concept. Therefore soccer was not new to him but the final call for the direction he is taking was with the 12 presidents who gave him the backing.