Britain's Andy Pink is leaving Greece after his volleyball team refused to pay him.
Great Britain's Andy Pink is leaving Greece after his volleyball team refused to pay him
All I Want for Christmas is a brand new team!
It is often said that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. In the light of recent world developments we can be sure that the latter is patently false and the former is under threat from science. As such, I would like to put forward two other certainties.
One: No matter where you are in the world, if there is building work being done, hunched -over old men with their hands clasped behind their backs will stand and watch in amazement, as if they have been transported to the 21st century from the time of homo habilis. I didn't realise that replacing a window frame could be so fascinating.
Two: If something is too good to be true, it is. So it proved to be too good to be true here in Greece...
For the past three weeks or so I have become increasingly disillusioned with my club and the way in which they conduct themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly they have had money problems. Over the last 10 weeks I've played without any payment of any kind, which in itself might be enough for the more thin-skinned of you to throw in the towel on the whole project.
But having played in Greece before I was well aware of how this all works. In short, if they don't have to pay you, they generally won't. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was the repeated and remarkable lies told to me over the phone, by proxy and most infuriatingly, face to face.
Lies
If I had a quid for every time I was told there would be money coming 'tomorrow' I would have more than the value of my entire contract. The only 'power' players have in these situations (and I use that term very very loosely) is to threaten to stop playing, or insinuate that you may not have a great game in the next fixture.
It's not big, it's not clever, but when you can't afford toothpaste those thoughts go out of the window pretty quickly. I had meetings with the coach three or four times a week to express my displeasure in the situation and after being lied to for the 406th time, I'd had enough and missed training one day due to 'illness'. My wallet was the ill one. If I had to make a diagnosis I would say it was suffering from a not-so-rare form of monetary dehydration. It can kill, you know.
Predictably, the coach went spare but then again you can't prove to someone you have a bad headache so what can he do? But, I was paid within two or three days thereafter. However, a working relationship had been broken. If I'm being totally honest it started to really go south when they couldn't afford to have hot water in the showers at the gym for a week, and our restaurant (who is supposed to be a sponsor) told us they couldn't give us any more food (which is stipulated in my contract) as no one from the club had been to pay the pittance they owed.
The writing was on the wall, but the working relationship with the coach too had been severed beyond repair. If they had come clean about their money issues perhaps we could have found a solution but they seemed to be economical with the truth on a daily basis. So I agreed with the coach that last Saturday's match would be my last in the black and white colours of Patras.
I awoke on Monday morning following our third win on the trot to find the headline in the newspaper reading ''Pink is leaving''. The sub text was told to me to say that I had 'lost my place to a young player and was no longer needed'. I'm still laughing. It's understandable that they want to make themselves look good, but everyone in Greek volleyball knows that they don't have any money so it seemed a low blow as a parting gift.
As I pen this I am in my last 24 hours as a player in Greece. I have decided that with one eye on the summer of 2012, it would be prudent of me to go to another team where we can work towards the same goals for the last four months of the professional season without any suspicion or subtext. I'm only waiting to sign the papers to officially break my contract and initiate proceedings with the FIVB then I shall make my jailbreak.
Makeshift
I can leave you with this little anecdote however. You may have seen volleyball players' hands and fingers wrapped in tape. This can be for a myriad of reasons. Either broken fingers are strapped to another one to allow the player to continue to compete. Or to help stop the skin from painful cracking and bleeding that can occur after years of hitting a ball as hard as you can.
Generally, if you sprain a finger a local GP will tell you to strap it up and don't use it for four weeks or more, but in volleyball the training and matches never stop. On any given volleyball court, out of the 12 players, I bet at least six of them are playing with a broken or badly sprained finger. One of the players on my soon-to-be-former team has to wear a bit of hard plastic molded to fit his thumb down to his wrist to stop his thumb from breaking anytime a ball comes near it.
This in itself is not unusual. The player in question arrived for a match and suddenly realised he hadn't brought his bit of molded plastic with him. He was absolutely panicking, throwing everything around the changing room to search for it but alas it was in vain.
With no time to go home and fetch it he had to find an alternate solution. He started picking up everything you can imagine to see if he could fashion a replacement for this bespoke device. You often hear on football phone-in shows that players in lower levels will perhaps fold over a magazine to replace a shin guard or something of that ilk.
But this is the highest level of professional volleyball in Greece, surely we wouldn't resort to such amateur measures. In the end he took a teaspoon, wrapped it about 1000 times in takeaway menus he found outside the sports hall to give it some width, and tapped it to his thumb. Unbelievable. He played on, played well and we won. I suppose the mother of invention is indeed necessity.
So my grim predictions about this season in Greece have proved startlingly accurate and this is the last missive I will send from this special place. I have a few options lined up but can't inform you, dear reader, just yet as to where I'll be in the New Year. You'll just have to check back in a few weeks' time to find out! For now, eat, drink, and be merry.
