Cree soccer player off to play in England

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Bernie Half made his third trip of the year across the Atlantic Ocean earlier this month.

The 17-year-old Cree whose family roots are in the Saddle Lake First Nation in Alberta will join the Liverpool Junior Football Club as the team completes its exhibition season this winter. He will remain in England for the regular season which begins after the World Cup this coming summer.

Half was playing for the provincial all-star Alberta Selects in a tournament in Florida last July when he was approached about signing on for a year with the junior (18-years and under) affiliate of the English Premier League Liverpool Football Club.

He attended try-outs in Europe later that month, made the team and then came home to Edmonton. He returned to Liverpool in September and spent almost a month with the club before once again returning home to spend a couple of weeks with his mom, Linda.

It's extremely rare for a North American-trained soccer player to perform in such elite company, but the modest six-foot-tall, 160 pound centre-forward isn't getting a swelled head.

"There's lots of players better than me in my high school," Half said.

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Apparently, the scouts don't agree.

Half was playing for a team that had access to all of the best soccer players in the province of Alberta when he was spotted in Florida. Of all those excellent players, only Half and one other were invited to play in England.

The Liverpool junior club can only be called a soccer factory where the talents and skills of the best players the scouts can find are finely honed. The intensity of the team's year-round training regime would be wasted on a player of inferior ability. The recruits begin their six-day-a-week workouts at 8 a.m. and continue until 5 p.m. Frequently, an evening game follows. Sundays are the players' only day off.

The level of play that Half experienced during his first month was like nothing he'd ever seen before, he reports.

"It's way different from here," he said. "It's very challenging. They play it real rough, a lot rougher than we play it here. It's more like rugby."

Playing for Liverpool - a perennial Premier League club - is the kind of thing that English school-boys dream of in the same way that Canadian kids dream of playing for the Montreal Canadiens or the Edmonton Oilers. Playing for the juniors is similar to playing Major Junior hockey. Getting the kind of coaching one receives while playing in one of the hottest of the world's soccer hotbeds is a rare experience, especially for a Canadian player. Seeing how serious they take the sport in that part of the world was a real eye-opener for the youngster who grew up in Lac La Biche, Alberta.

"It's like life to them," he said, sounding more than a bit in awe of his new playing environment.

Half said that the biggest lesson he learned during his first exposure to top level European football was just how much 11 men can do when they play as a well-co-ordinated team.

"The way they play as a team is so different," he said. "They way they do it, everything has to be perfect."

The club picks up all of the junior players' living expenses and also provides tutors who travel with the team so that the high school players can combine their studies with the very demanding schedule. Soccer is a truly global sport and, during his first month with the Liverpool club, Half got to see a lot of the world.

"We play all over. I was in Italy, Greece and El Salvador," he said.

And he has already done something that most serious soccer fans can only dream of: a couple of his team's games in England were contested before packed houses in London's venerable Wembley Stadium.

The new Liverpudlian must aggravate a lot of his English teammates who've labored hard throughout their young lives for a spot on this elite team. Half says he just started fooling around with a soccer ball in Lac La Biche when he was seven years old. He was a natural. He didn't even start playing organized soccer until his amily moved to Edmonton when he was 11.

"I guess I just sort of taught myself how to play," he said.

The soccer coach at M.E. LaZerte Composite High School in the Alberta capital might be a little upset to hear where the former LaZerte student is playing now because Half didn't even try out for his high school team. He has, however, spent the past several seasons playing on as many as three different men's teams at a time.

The junior team is designed to be a feeder system for the Liverpool professional club, but Half said he doesn't ever expect to play in the English Premier League. Part of that is his genuine modesty. But there's one other reason.

"It's just too far away," he said, admitting he gets homesick when he's so far away. "I know I'm going to learn a lot playing there and then I'll come back home and play closer to home, maybe Mexico or something like that."

The fans in England don't realize he's a Cree Indian from North America. Marcel Cardinal, an active Edmonton-area sports figure who knows Half's family, told Windspeaker the English fans have given him a Spanish nickname, assuming him to be Hispanic. Half laughed when he heard that Cardinal had let that particular cat out of the bag and verified the story.

Cardinal wants him to make a stand and proudly tell the soccer world that he's a Cree from Alberta. The quiet, unassuming teenager doesn't seem to want any part of that.

"I just play soccer," he said. "That's all I do."