Less than an hour before kickoff of the opening game of the 1994 World Cup qualifying tournament, Arnie Ramirez fo­und himself in the most unusual place he had ever given pre-game instructions: the food storage room of Estadio Olympico in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.



Without a blackboard to diagram last-minute strategies, the special technical adviser to the Puerto Rico national team demonstrated his creativity with the next best thing: water bottles, plastic cups and oranges to get his point across. “As a coach you have to improvise sometimes,” Ramirez tells the Guardian.

That scene helped define Puerto Rico’s wild ride to their first World Cup qualifying success. Many islanders claimed the side was a bunch of pariahs and an illegal squad as it used 14 mainland American players. The team wound up enduring several layers of gamesmanship in the Dominican Republic to record their first qualifying win on March 21 1992, 24 years ago this week.

“When I tell people about it, they just don’t believe me,” team captain Mark Lugris says with a laugh. “No way, no way that happened. Are you for real?”

Oh, it was for real.

The journey began when Puerto Rican players boycotted training to protest the firing of Victor Hugo Barros in December 1991. Dr Roberto Monroig, president of the Puerto Rican Soccer Federation, asked Ramirez, then coach of the Long Island University soccer team in New York, for help.

Ramirez, who was the coach without the title, wanted to use US-based players and called up Guido Tognoni, then a top Fifa executive, to inquire about player eligibility.

“He said, ‘Arnold, anybody who has [a US passport] can play for Puerto Rico [as long as they have] never played for the US,’” says Ramirez.

Puerto Rico is a US territory so its residents use American passports.

Ramirez rounded up players, mostly from local amateur and semi-pro leagues. They trained on the wooden floors of the LIU gymnasium in the dead of winter at ungodly hours. Not necessarily a traditional way to prepare for World Cup qualifying.

As the first leg of a home-and-home series grew closer, a verbal counterattack lashed out in Puerto Rico, claiming that the team did not truly represent Puerto Rico – indeed members of Ramirez’s squad such as Stan Koziol, Ramiro Borj and Franco Paonessa had no Puerto Rican heritage but could play for the team through their US passports.

“The Puerto Rican Olympic Committee made a whole big deal that we couldn’t go, that we couldn’t represent Puerto Rico,” Ramirez says. “Dr Monroig said the Olympics and Fifa were two different animals. The Olympic federation had nothing to do with Fifa.”

The players took their participation seriously.

“To play in a game like that meant something,” says Lugris, a Fordham University graduate whose mother had Puerto Rican heritage. “There was so much conflict around it. Being Puerto Rican and being in the middle of it, I had people on the island having a go at me for not honoring the boycott and articles written in the papers [they called us] the not-so Puerto Rican national team.

“It was kind of farcical. We were being portrayed, not as mercenaries because there were really no pros [on the team], but more of just a joke. If you think of the personal sacrifice that people gave to have the opportunity. Guys were working 10, 12 hours a day then training on a basketball court to play in a World Cup qualifier at 10[pm] to midnight, then went from the freezing cold of New York to the stifling heat of the Dominican Republic.”

The headaches and roadblocks began when the team flew into Santo Domingo several days before the match against the Dominican Republic.

“I called up the hotel and I told them that we needed transportation, needed a bus at a certain time,” Ramirez said. “When we got to the Dominican Republic, there was no bus. We waited for three hours. The people from the [Dominican] federation said, ‘You were supposed to come tomorrow not today.’ We [had told them] we were coming today.”

When the team arrived at the Hotel Comodoro, the team was told the reservations were supposed to start the following day. The team managed to book rooms on the spot.

Ramirez then spoke to the head chef and explained the team’s schedule – breakfast at eight, lunch at two and dinner at seven.

“The next morning we go to breakfast at eight. Nobody is around,” he says. “What’s going on? ‘Oh, we forgot about it. I’m sorry. We’ll have it in about a half an hour.’ Finally, they showed up at nine o’clock. They screwed up my whole practice.”

The Dominicans were already playing a game, one of gamesmanship.

“When you play away these things happen,” Ramirez says. “It happened to us when we played in the Caribbean Cup. We went to Guyana and we waited three hours for a bus. They took us to a hotel and it was a hotel for prostitutes and I said we can’t stay here.

“When you play away against these teams, they try everything to mess you up and they do it on purpose. You hear sometimes when the Americans go to [Central America], and in the old days. You had bands making loud music so they couldn’t go to sleep.”

One day the team was forced to train in a cow pasture. “A crappy field” with “manure,” Ramirez said.

The next day, Puerto Rico practiced on a field that housed horses. Santo Domingo was prone to blackouts and one occurred near the end of the session. “We’re about a half hour from the hotel with no transportation,” Lugris says. “Arnie gets us together: ‘We’re going to jog back to the hotel. Grab your bags, stay close together.’ He had this guy in the taxi who drove in front of us with his lights on and we were behind the taxi. We jogged all the way back to the hotel. It was surreal.”

Not surprisingly, the team bus did not show up on game day. A van made two trips to the stadium; the first took Ramirez and the starting XI, the second the reserves.

When the team arrived, the locker room was in a putrid condition, and the toilets backed up. “It was a dump,” Ramirez says. “It was foul smelling and probably wasn’t used for a long time.”

So, they negotiated to dress in a delivery area with benches and tables that was converted into a makeshift locker room.

Life went on. A dog that called the stadium home was terrified of the interlopers and hid. A worker continued delivering bananas as the players dressed. After a Fifa passport inspection was completed without incident, Ramirez performed his last-minute instructions using those cups, water bottles and oranges.

“Credit Arnie,” Lugris says. “He could make a practice in a stairwell. He just got the oranges and the cups out and explained what we needed to do. The marines would say, ‘You get an obstacle and you just improvise and overcome.’ That’s what Arnie always was, no matter what was thrown at us.”

Puerto Rico dominated the game, played before an estimated 5,000 spectators in a stadium that had seen better days. The scoreboard, which looked like it had caught fire at least once, did not work.

Fifteen minutes in, Puerto Rico had a build-up on the left side. Franco Paonessa found Stan Koziol, who put through the ball to an overlapping Lugris. “It was a very bobbly field. It was dry and bumpy,” Lugris says. “The ball was played through and it kind of hopped up a little bit and I hit just wide of the post. I just thought to myself, ‘Man if I can get that again I’ll score.’ “

Eight minutes later, the same combination connected and Lugris got his wish. He expected the ball to hop up and hit it perfectly, off the left post and into the net for the first goal of qualifying for the 1994 World Cup. “I just started to run towards the bench,” he remembers. “I did one of those knee slides that you see today. I felt like I did it on barb wire. My knees were bleeding the rest of the game. But just the sheer joy of it, the relief of all the stress and everything that I had been going through it was just magic.

“It was one of the best moments in my life. Not so much about scoring the goal or it being me. It was about everything that we had gone through as a group of people and the camaraderie. Everything just coming together. We had been beaten down in many different ways. We felt at that point that we could win the game. We hung in and we did get our dream.”

Ramiro Borja, the younger brother of New York Cosmos’ Chico Borja, doubled the advantage in the 57th minute before Dinardo pulled one back for the hosts 11 minutes later. Goalkeeper Chico Mieles made two point-blank saves in the waning moments and Puerto Rico made history. Afterwards, fans – mostly Dominicans – spilled on to to the field to talk to the players, a scene unthinkable in today’s world of heightened security. There were no incidents.

Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic’s German coach, Bernhard Zgoll, verbally sparred with Ramirez. “He told the Fifa inspectors that the United States can’t have two teams,” Ramirez says. “The Fifa inspectors told him, ‘No. Puerto Rico is different than the United States.’ I guess he was not that well educated about geography and knowing about Puerto Rico.

“He said, ‘I’m going to play this game under protest.’ He said that he could lose his job … He was going to sue me for a million dollars. But I said you can’t do that because we did everything the correct way. I called Fifa and they said these players can play.”

During the post-match interviews, Lugris had wrapped the Puerto Rican flag around his shoulders. Asked if a person can have two homes, he answered: “He can have one in his heart and where he lives.”

After talking with a BBC television crew Lugris discovered that the team already had bolted for the hotel, leaving him, Koziol and Nazario stranded. They asked the worker who let the team into the stadium if he could drive them back to the hotel. Lugris had bunched up the flag under his shirt, not wanting to incite disappointed fans exiting the stadium.

“We were in uniform. There was nowhere to change,” he says. “Stas [Koziol] urged me to take it out and we held onto it together as it was draped over the end of the pick-up truck. It was a great moment for all of us it was truly a unique experience. We held the flag up over the back off the truck all the way back to the hotel. Three guys in soccer uniforms in the back of a pick-up truck filled with plantains with a Puerto Rican flag. They thought we were nuts. People just stared at us.”

A week later in the second leg, Puerto Rico made history again, securing a spot in the second Caribbean round for the first time with a 1-1 home draw. The team did not fare as well in the next round against Jamaica, beaten 2-1 on the road followed by a 1-0 home loss.

Lugris, though, wouldn’t have traded it for the world. “It was very stressful, but worth it in the end,” he says. “It was a great experience.”