From ninth tier to coaching in Champions League against Manchester United

“It is a bit of a crossroads for some of our boys,” Ridhwan Ahmed, the team’s manager, tells The Indian Express from London. “Do you support your own club, or the manager who came through these exact doors? But listen, not everyone gets to say that a manager who is now at the Champions League was once our manager. It is an amazing feeling to get to say that.”

“It is so unreal. We were looking back at the time that Valdas spent with us. Imagine a guy going from the ninth division to managing a team in the Champions League against Manchester United. Absolutely surreal.”

Sabah are strangers to Europe’s elite competition — the club turned nine only last Tuesday. England, though, is not a stranger to Valdas. He first arrived in Britain in 2003.

London Tigers FC with the UK Asian Community Cup trophy, which manager Ridhwan Ahmed calls an incredible achievement. (Special Arrangement)

Born in the Soviet Union, Valdas spent the first half of his twenties working for a flooring company while studying philosophy and social sciences by correspondence at Šiauliai University. When he was not doing either of the two, he read. Voraciously.

Dambrauskas auditioned for Šeši nuliai – milijonas, the Lithuanian edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — the show Indian audiences know as Kaun Banega Crorepati. Asked to name the Scandinavian god of thunder, he had no Chris Hemsworth to summon — the film would be made years later. But he had read about Thor.

He won 4,000 litas. The money helped finance his move to London with his girlfriend, where he enrolled in a sports science and coaching course at London Metropolitan University. To make ends meet, he would pick up odd jobs — gardening, floor-cleaning, handyman work, delivering newspapers.

Coaching opportunities came through the university course, including work with Manchester United Soccer Schools and part-time roles at Fulham and Brentford. A full-time opportunity, though, would never arrive.

First Break

That was until he applied for a role at London Tigers in 2007.

“We were looking for a coach at the time, and Valdas was also desperately looking for an opportunity, so it worked for both parties. At the time, no one had heard of him. He didn’t have any coaching experience when he came to us,” recalls Ridhwan.

“He wasn’t just our manager, though. We are primarily a charity, working for the BAME (Black, Asian, Minority, Ethnic) communities of London. Besides coaching the boys, he would also volunteer in our charity work. That tells a lot about the person that he is.”

Ridhwan won’t pretend he foresaw the Champions League. But he never doubted Dambrauskas would outgrow non-league obscurity.

“He had this fuel in him that got him to where he is. When he arrived here, we were playing amateur football. But Valdas was determined to take us to the semi-professional level, and he did that. We achieved things with him that we never thought we would.”

In that same year, however, he left England to move back to Lithuania.

Dambrauskas being lifted by his players after winning the UK Asian Community Cup. (Special Arrangement)

“I understood that to be a professional football coach in England and move up, to be a head coach or manager, was impossible. With my Lithuanian passport, with the country’s name that nobody can pronounce, with my surname that nobody can pronounce and, on top of that, I was never a professional player. My dream was so big that I packed my stuff into one minibus, put my two boys and my wife in, and we went back to Lithuania,” the coach told his former club, Brentford.

He is back in England now, at the very top of the game. So too are Justinas Gasiūnas and Eddie Cardoso, once his lieutenants at London Tigers, now his lieutenants at Sabah.

“Valdas didn’t forget his roots,” Ridhwan says. “He didn’t go chasing big names for his staff. He took the same guys he worked with at our club.”

There are no prizes, come Thursday, for guessing where Ridhwan’s allegiance will lie.

“We have a new saying at our club: We were coached by the best.”