Musa Okwonga - Football Legends: Raheem Sterling

Scholastic Childrens Books
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2020
This electronic edition published 2020

Text Musa Okwonga, 2020

Cover illustration Stanley Chow, 2020

eISBN 9780702301186

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Contents

While this book is based on real people and actual events, some situations and conversations are fictional, created by the author.

LONDON, 2002

Imagine you are sitting high up in a tree, on a sunny Sunday afternoon. There is one small white cloud floating through a bright blue sky, slowly beginning to hide the sun. As you look around, shifting on the branch, you see rows and rows of red rooftops, rolling off in every direction. There is only one building you can see that is taller than the tree where you are sitting. Its a few miles away. It is as high as a block of flats and as wide as a shopping centre, with flags flying from its light grey walls, and two white towers rising above its main entrance. It looks magnificent.

This building is called Wembley Stadium, where the national team of England plays football. You look down from the tree, towards a gap between the houses, at a small square patch of grass. It is then that you see the boy.

He is all alone on the green, and maybe that is why he looks so small. His skin is the colour of the sky just after sunset. He is wearing a red shirt and white shorts, but you cant see what he is wearing on his feet because they are moving too fast. In fact, the boy is moving so fast up and down that patch of grass that at first you think he is flying, even though you know that humans cant do that. He is running after a small white ball. When the ball slows down he nudges it forward with his foot, and every now and then he swerves from side to side, as if he is trying to escape someone who is chasing him. You are so busy watching him that you lean forward too far and you almost fall off your branch.

After a few minutes of running round and round the grass, the boy slows down, and picks up the ball. He gazes at the stadium, which he can just see over the top of the houses. The boy stands there until a woman comes out of the house and calls him to come inside. Raheem, she says, dinner is ready, and the boy runs as fast as he did when he was chasing the ball. Raheem, you think, what a lovely name.

KINGSTON, JAMAICA, 1996

Raheem was just two years old, and he had only one parent left.

At the time his dad died, Raheem and his family were living in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, in an area called Maverley. He was born there, six years after his sister, and it was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, and where the children always played outside. When there was a storm, the rain would decorate the grey streets, and the children would rush laughing through the puddles; and because the rain was so warm, running in it felt like taking a shower.

People in Raheems neighbourhood didnt have very much. They had to work hard just so there was enough for everyone. All they really had was their friends and their siblings and their mums and their dads, and some of them didnt even have that.

No one knew exactly what happened to Raheems dad, but what they did know was that one day some people got very angry with him and went looking for him with their guns. When they found him, they didnt talk, they fired, and thats how they took Raheems dad away.

It was one of the hardest times in Raheems life, and it was about to get even harder. Soon his mum had to leave too. She couldnt find a job that paid well enough in Jamaica, so she went to the UK to study there and hopefully earn enough to support her children. Raheem was too young to understand why she had to go. All he knew was that he used to have two parents, and now it felt like he had none.

Surrounded By Love

But even though he had lost his dad forever and his mum had gone far away, Raheem was still surrounded by love. He and his sister went to live with their grandmother.

If he was good Raheems grandmother would let him go and buy ice cream from the local shop. So many small towns in Jamaica have a shop like that, where it feels like you can buy anything. You normally find them on the corner of a street, and they look very small from the outside, but once you walk inside its like being in a cave. You just have to tell the shopkeeper what you want, and hell disappear into a little room at the back for a few seconds before coming out with whatever you asked for. You could ask him for some batteries, a toothbrush, a kettle, even a chicken just give him a few minutes, and he would return with it in his hands.

That was how Raheems life started: with some very sad times, but some very happy ones too. Ice cream, running through the rain and, of course, lots of busy days playing football with his friends. But for him to have a life more exciting than he could imagine, he would have to get on a plane.

DOES THIS COUNTRY HAVE A SUN?

When Raheem was five years old, he and his sister moved to his new home the city of London, the capital of England. They had gone there to be with their mum, but they soon found that London was very, very different from Jamaica. The buildings were taller and the traffic was louder and the crowds were bigger and, maybe most of all, the weather was colder. Some days he would look up at the sky and ask himself, Does this country even have a sun?

Raheem lived in a part of London called Wembley. There were so many people there from all over the world, which meant that at his new school Raheem met children from lots of countries he hadnt heard of before. There were people there from England and India and Sri Lanka and Kenya and Pakistan and Somalia and Ireland and Poland and from Jamaica, just like Raheem. If you walked down the main street and listened carefully, you could hear a new language. If you stopped next to the open door of each restaurant, you could smell a new type of food.

When people met Raheem in his new home they noticed that he didnt talk very much, and they thought he was shy. But he wasnt he was just getting to know them, working out if he could trust them. When he got to know you well, he talked a lot more.