Introducing football to the country with one pitch

Sport InsightIntroducing football to the country with one pitchPublished5 minutes agoImage source, Paul WatsonByNathan EdwardsBBC SportLike everywhere, the world's smallest island nation has been gripped by football fever for the past six weeks. But once Spain lifted the World Cup trophy on Sunday, almost every trace of football on Nauru stopped.Football is almost non-existent on this Pacific island. Nauru has never fielded a team in an official international match and it has just one – hard sand – pitch.While there is interest in big Premier League matches, and children wear Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo kits, any attempts to actually play football tend to be mocked, unless it's Aussie rules.But things may be slowly changing as a group of volunteers - led by British former academy player Charlie Pomroy - seek to introduce the game to what was once the world's richest nation per capita but is now heavily reliant on foreign aid and has one of the highest obesity rates in the world.A social media post from the Nauru Soccer Federation congratulating the new world champions and setting out a dream that "one day we hope to be in Spain's position" may have been fanciful, but the groundwork is real in what it says is the last country not to have had a senior international side.Laying the foundations, though, on an island where over-mining has left the landscape looking more like a moonscape, has been far from straightforward.Image source, Nauru Soccer FederationImage caption, These Nauru residents watched the World Cup final on a phone Nauru has tried to develop football previously, but it has never really taken off. The closest it has come to playing an international match was when representative teams faced a Solomon Islands expatriate team in 1994 and a refugee side in 2014.Its complicated past goes some way to explaining why the world's most popular sport has struggled for participation.Located in the Pacific Ocean 2,500 miles no...