This is only the 4th book review I've written for this blog and the first that isn't about football or music. They all have one thing in common, though: a description of arriving in Montserrat for the first time by air. Trevor Stephenson is the only one of those people who stayed. It took six short train journeys to read the book, which is a tribute to the editing, pacing, and quality of the stories.

(c)Goldenmedia, www.discovermni.com On Friday 11th Sepyember FIFA issued the following statement. "Following proceedings before the independent FIFA Ethics Committee, the adjudicatory chamber of said body has sanctioned" the following "individuals as a result of their conduct whilst serving in football. Former president of the Montserrat Football Association (MFA), Vincent Cassell: lifetime ban on taking part in any football-related activity and order to pay a fine of CHF 1,000,000 for abuse of position, systemic conflicts of interest, misuse of FIFA and MFA funds and conduct affecting the physical and mental integrity of MFA staff members.

I'm sure Eze Bongo won't mind me posting this picture of him in Montserrat's Hot Water Pond. I wrote the post beneath it four years ago when I was there myself. At that point, it was a small hole dug in the ground, through the ash. I also found pictures of the pond as it was in 1995. Hot Water Pond is still Hot…

Concacaf has now set out how its 41 member associations will fill the sixteen places at the 2027 Gold Cup, and the route runs entirely through this autumn's Nations League. No separate qualifying tournament is layered on top. Everything, from the group stage in September through to the Prelims next March, feeds directly into the same sixteen slots, with Saudi Arabia returning as the guest nation to complete the field.

Montserrat has a population of just over 4,000. Under FIFA’s reported World Cup sell-off plan, its football association could be offered US$40 million, a figure equal to roughly 40% of the is…

There is, at last, a realistic prize on offer for the Montserrat Football Team. The revamped CONCACAF Nations League for 2026/27 introduces a League C Championship, a mini-tournament for the third …

Don’t get too excited. I just uploaded a couple of pictures to Chat GPT and asked it to design me a book cover, and this is what it came up with. You can’t buy it. But I have written a …

A new report from the Finance Innovation Lab, published this month ahead of the UK’s Illicit Finance Summit, puts a number on something that campaigners have argued for years: the British Ove…

It was good to see Montserrat striker Lyle Taylor on Football Focus today (16/05/26). He appeared alongside Liam Atkinson of Longridge Town as they collected their trophies for being joint top scor…

Earlier this week the Chief Minister of St Helena, Rebecca Cairns-Wicks, issued a statement on the deal to take asylum seekers from the British Indian Ocean Territory. “Over recent weeks, sup…

Nigel Farage has been at the centre of Britain’s political establishment for a generation now. He is the last man standing from a political class that has dominated political debate in the UK…

When the Chagos deal collapsed earlier this year, it did not merely leave a diplomatic mess in the South Atlantic. It also left the UK Government without an answer to a straightforward question: wh…

On 14 April 2026, what had been listed as a five-day jury trial in the High Court of Montserrat came to an abrupt conclusion before it had properly begun. Vincent Cassell, former President of the M…

One of the more irritating habits I have developed over the years is telling people from Northern Ireland that Montserrat was commemorating St Patrick’s Day before them. The the reason both d…

There is something both moving and troubling about the events of February 2026, when members of the Mandarin family stepped ashore on Île du Coin in the Peros Banhos atoll, in a visit funded by a c…

The construction contract for Montserrat’s new port has been allowed to expire seven years after the project was launched with great fanfare in 2019, and four years after the construction contract …

Something happened this week that had nothing to do with Iran, and everything to do with it. The UK government has pulled the Diego Garcia bill from the upcoming King’s Speech. The Chagos dea…

When the UK government announced sweeping cuts to its overseas aid budget, the headlines focused on the losers: programmes in Africa and Asia flatlined or cancelled, development spending redirected…

When Reform UK’s Home Affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf tweeted that a future Reform government would ban visas to nationals of CARICOM and other countries demanding reparations, he exposed more than …

On 7 April 2026, the FIFA-appointed Normalisation Committee running the Montserrat Football Association issued a public notice inviting every creditor with a claim against the MFA to submit a forma…

The Montserrat FA had advertised for a National Coach. But not just a national coach. Duties include a requirement to promote and improve the game of football in Montserrat at all levels from Grass…

In January 2026, FIFA stepped in to take over the running of football on Montserrat. The Montserrat Football Association had been judged to be in what FIFA described as an “exceptional crisis…

With Montserrat Football in a bit of a mess, I thought I’d check online who is voting in the FIFA awards this year. It has previously been Lyle Taylor, the Captain, Basil Chambers from the media, a…