London United: Charity helps 800 youngsters escape gang postcode wars

Mesba Ahmed’s battle for floodlit facilities kick-started a  charity that helps 800 young people escape postcode wars
Nurturing talent: one of the London Tigers coaching sessions on the Lisson Green estate. Below, Mesba Ahmed Ahmedbackgrounds for an FA coaching qualification

When Mesba Ahmed was a football-mad teenager growing up on the Lisson Green estate, a dense conglomeration of tower blocks near Lord’s cricket ground, there was nowhere for him and his friends to play football.

“We had to use the streets and pavements of the estate as our football pitch, despite the fact that we lived in the heart of wealthy St John’s Wood,” he recalled. “Garage doors doubled as goals, coats and jumpers were propped up to make the other goal and when cars came we had to quickly stop the game to let them by.”

More than a decade later on the birth of his first son in 1999, Mr Ahmed realised nothing had changed and decided to do something about it so that things would be better for his son and his friends. He began coaching young people from the estate on a dilapidated piece of tarmac on the edge of the estate. When he heard that Westminster council was planning to regenerate the area, he seized the moment.

“I met the council and the estate manager and I asked them to invest some of the regeneration money to turn the tarmac into an all-weather astroturf pitch with floodlights,” he said. “They turned me down and said that residents would never agree to floodlights because they were so intrusive.”

Mr Ahmed called their bluff and insisted on putting it to a residents’ meeting. “I told them that if they agreed to my proposal, crime would fall because instead of youngsters hanging around stairwells, and harassing residents and smoking and drinking, they would be so tired from football that they would go straight home for dinner. I said we would teach the youngsters how to behave decently as well as football skills.

“The next day I got a message from the residents’ association to go ahead — and that instead of the 7pm floodlight curfew I had asked for, the lights could stay on until 9pm.”

That feisty bit of activism not only marked a critical point in the fight against crime on the estate, it was also the beginning of a remarkable charity called London Tigers.

Today the Lisson Green estate has a top-notch 3G astroturf pitch with floodlights, thanks to Mr Ahmed, and London Tigers has expanded to run football sessions on a further seven estates, helping 800 children across the boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Ealing and Tower Hamlets.

This season Mr Ahmed is putting out 14 football teams, from under-10 youth league to semi-professional adult teams that will compete in the FA Cup and FA Vase. But the football coaches are the lifeblood of London Tigers, he said. They have 30 of them. And to reach more children, the equation is simple — they need more.

Now thanks to our London United campaign — which has partnered with The FA to train at least 100 young people, male and female, from disadvantaged backgrounds to become football coaches — this will be possible.

London Tigers has put forward 28 young people from deprived backgrounds to do their FA Level-1 coaching qualification with London United, including four who will join the inaugural first cohort at Wembley Stadium.

Greenhouse, the Peckham-based sports charity we featured yesterday, has taken up 24 places. The rest of the places on the FA Level-1 training courses run by The FA for London United will be filled by young people from 16 other grassroots charities operating in 15 boroughs. They include groups that use football as a catalyst to engage the homeless, asylum seekers, refugees and reformed gang members.

“The timing of the Evening Standard campaign is perfect for us because we have just signed a lease on a fabulous new sports ground in Southall and so we need many more coaches,” said Mr Ahmed.

“We take the coaches on a personal journey which is about becoming a successful human being and a role model as well as the art of teaching children football. There is huge interest among the older youngsters who play in our teams to get their FA qualifications.

“Once they graduate, we bring them in as assistant coaches and some of them will work with QPR and Brentford as part of an exciting existing partnership programme we have with them.”

Mr Ahmed, who prides himself on being a thorn in the side of the establishment, described how he stood up in front of 500 people at Westminster council meetings and vociferously complained that council football facilities were being denied to charities because they had been booked up by corporates, so much so that London Tigers’ teams were being forced to go out of the borough to train.

“I shamed them into changing the system so that today community and charitable groups get priority over corporates,” he said.

THE murder in 2007 of 18-year-old Jevon Henry — stabbed through the heart only yards from the Lisson Green football pitch by five drug dealers, including two sets of brothers living on the estate — led Mr Ahmed to step up his efforts to achieve social change through football. “For years I had been telling anyone who would listen that putting resources into grassroots football is part of the answer to tackling anti-social behaviour and postcode gang warfare.

“I took teenagers from gangs on estates in the Harrow Road area and I got them to play with kids in gangs on the Lisson Green estate.

“At first there was macho posturing, but they saw how the coaches from the different estates were cool with each other and after a couple of sessions, things eased up. Gradually they began to see themselves as part of London Tigers and identified more with their football club than their respective gangs.”

He got Karen Buck, MP for Westminster North, to witness his social experiment for herself. “She was so impressed that she introduced me to Gordon Brown, then the Chancellor, and she told him that our charity, which worked with children of 20 languages, was an exemplar of multi-cultural community cohesion at its best.”

Now a married father of four, Mr Ahmed attributes his community spirit to his father, formerly a chef and community organiser in the London Bangladeshi community.

He keeps in good physical nick and fancies himself on the pitch as able to shimmy past young people half his age.

He still gets animated when he relives the standout moment of his short footballing career when, as a 17-year-old, he lined up against a team from the Middlesex Professional Boys’ Club.

“I went past two defenders, just left them for dead, and then I scored an incredible goal that my former teammates still talk about,” he beamed. “I had the potential and it was my dream to be a professional footballer but for people on our estate there was little chance.”

Is that what drives him? He smiled wistfully. “I suppose it’s my secret ambition to discover the first Asian David Beckham. We have never had an Asian play football for England.

“Mostly what I focus on, what I try to do, is provide a fun outlet for young people away from gangs.

“At the end of the day, it is about giving youngsters on these estates the opportunities that people like me never had.”

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