IT was a birthday celebration after Saturday morning football practice. The 12 boys — members of Moo Pa, the Wild Boars football team — were drawn to a vast and seemingly magical cave, Tham Luang.

It all began on June 23. The boys, aged 11 to 16, rode their bikes down to the cave and spent 700 baht ($28) at the local shop, buying food, soft drink and sweets.

They left their bikes at the entrance and descended deep into the cave. The sign nearby warning that venturing inside during the wet season was dangerous because of the risk of sudden flooding meant little — this was a place they knew and loved.

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They were a motley mob — hill tribe lads, Shan, Lahu and Lua, plus a couple of Lanna Thai (boys from the north) — on a boys’ own adventure. But their little journey of exploration was badly timed. A torrential downpour, hardly surprising at this time of year — rudu fon (rainy season) — has left them in a dire predicament.

Family members raised the alarm later that day. Where were they? What exactly happened next is still to be resolved. Many belive their coach 25-year-old Ekapol Jantawong, a stateless orphan who shared their love of football, tthen went o the cave. Near the entrance, he found their bikes, a discovery that meant he had to go deep inside to try to locate them and bring them back.

Camera Icon Ekapol Chanthawong with students at Mae Sai Prasitsart school by the mountain range housing the cave where they are now trapped. Source: Facebook Credit: Facebook

Ekapol’s role in this gripping tale of misadventure has been subject to intense scrutiny in the Thai press (and criticism on social media), but there seems little doubt he has played a substantial role in helping the boys to survive.

“When he was a boy he became a monk and studied while he lived in the temple (in Lamphun, several hours south); his parents were Burmese but had died, so he is a stateless person. He liked to do meditation and pray,” Am Sandford, a fixer for news teams at the scene said on Friday.

“He moved to Mae Sai (in Chiang Rai, near the cave) to stay with his grandmother. He loved to play football when he was a little boy. And he met many hill tribe kids on the Thai-Myanmar border. He felt they are like him — poor and with no opportunity to play football.

“He formed the football team with the main coach three years ago. The kids that joined the Moo Pa (literally “forest pigs”) team are mostly hill tribe. He loved all the 12 kids in the team as though they were his own sons. On Facebook or social media, he always posted stuff about the activities he did with the boys.”

Camera Icon Team work: Thai rescue teams use headlamps in one of their missions into the caves to make contact with the lost boys and their coach from the stranded soccer team. Above: Coach Ekapol Jantawongto with his boys in happier times. Below: The boys when they were found. Credit: AP

A huge rescue operation was set up to try to find the boys. But it took nine days before their families and the rest of the country even knew they were alive.

Hundreds of volunteers and officials had set up camp outside the cave but one of the most useful offers of help came from a small team of British cave divers.

At 9.40pm on Monday, July 2, two Britons with years of cave-diving experience emerged out of the darkness and shone a light on Ekapol and the boys, all thin but calm and intact — partly, people said, because Ekapol had taught them all how to meditate.

Camera Icon Richard Stanton, left, and John Volanthen arrive in Mae Sai. Credit: AP

John Volanthen, 47, and Rick Stanton, 56, had a short and touching conversation that was recorded on video and has now been seen by millions around the world.

“How many of you?”

“Thirteen,” Adul Samon, 14, one of the boys said.

“Brilliant.”

“What day is it?” Adul shouted back, before telling the divers they were hungry.

Camera Icon British cave-diver John Volanthen walks out from Tham Luang Nang Non cave in full kit. Credit: Getty Images

Later, more details emerged about Adul, who won praise for his ability to speak four languages — Thai, English, Burmese and Chinese — and being polite.

“The first thing that comes to mind when I talk about him is his nice manner. He gives a ‘wai’ (traditional hand gesture) to every teacher he walks past, every time,” his instructor Phannee Tiyaprom at Ban Pa Moead School told AFP.

Adul is from Wa state, an autonomous area in north-eastern Myanmar notorious for its drug trade. Like many children in the north, his parents, who are Christians, sent him, at a young age, to get a better education in northern Thailand.

Camera Icon The boys smile as Thai Navy SEAL medic help injured children inside the cave. Credit: AP

He is one of more than 400,000 people who are registered as stateless in Thailand and stuck in a legal limbo that groups such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees are trying to fix. With no birth certificate, ID card or passport, Adul cannot legally marry, get a job or bank account, travel outside the province, own property or vote.

But he loves football — like most of the boys, who have been asking about the results from the World Cup — plus singing and playing the guitar. His school director has praised his efforts at both studying and sport.

The desperation of poor parents to get their children a decent education in these parts is sometimes quite remarkable. I visited a centre for hill-tribe kids about an hour south of the Tham Luang cave nine years ago run by a former architect from the Gold Coast. David Stevenson said carloads of children were sometimes “dumped” at his centre in Mae Suay, Children of the Golden Triangle, even if he said they had no room. He had close to 300 Akha and other hill tribe kids at that time, with the older kids often cooking and caring for the younger ones.

Camera Icon Thai military bring water pumps to the cave. Credit: Getty Images

The cave drama has put a spotlight on the plight of these needy highland kids. The Thai government has been educating tens of thousands of migrant children but the process for giving citizenship and legal status for hill-tribe groups is appallingly complex and slow.

Some of the poorest areas in Thailand are in the far north and that stems partly from the 70-year-old civil war in Myanmar and the Burmese military’s seemingly endless bid to slowly strangle the country’s outlying ethnic groups.

Yet in Chiang Rai and elsewhere around the country, what Thais really want now is to just get these kids out alive. And if they can do it quickly, maybe they could also take up FIFA’s offer of a trip to the World Cup final. But that would require passports and other formal ID: maybe only a few could go.