Star Metro - Fiji football legend returns home to captain first pro club

Still, the muggy morning session has the Bula FC squad sweating heavily at the club's base in Ba, a town on Fiji's main island in a northern coastal area known for its sugarcane farms.

It is here that the country's greatest footballer of all time wants to pass on the lessons of an improbable career.

Just getting into professional football was "very hard", the Bula FC captain says.

He signed his first contract at the age of 26, transferring in 2014 to New Zealand-based side Wellington Phoenix to play in Australia's A-League.

That feat alone was remarkable for a player from Fiji, a footballing minnow that Krishna had left years earlier to play semi-professionally.

His 51 goals in just over 120 appearances for the Phoenix -- which included Golden Boot honours and the award for the league's best player -- earned him a place in Pacific football folklore.

- 'Don't go' -

A return home looked unlikely. But after six years in India, where he won a top division title and on three occasions finished as the league's joint-highest scorer, Krishna wanted to spend more time with his daughter in Fiji.

"She's just turned four and now she's having a proper conversation with me: 'Don't go, stay, where are you going?'," he says.

It helps that Fiji now has its first professional club, which only launched a few months ago.

Bula FC, where Krishna's wife is a senior executive, announced his signing in December for its participation in the inaugural season of the Oceania Football Confederation Pro League.

The FIFA-supported competition aims to help players from the likes of Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Tahiti forge careers in the world game.

Krishna has had to set the standards for a squad mostly made up of players who have never trained full-time.

"I wanted to tell them football is not just on the pitch, it's outside the pitch. How to look after yourself -- sleeping, the diet, what you eat, who you're hanging out with," he says.

"Here you think... you can go and drink kava and party the whole night and then come on Monday and train," he says, referring to the mildly intoxicating root drink that is traditional in the South Pacific.

"It doesn't work like that."

- 'Just smile' -

Head coach Stephane Auvray, 44, admits some were "a little clueless and naive" about the demands.

"We make a lot of stoppages (in training), so it gives us time to... make sure the players who need to be guided are guided," Auvray says.

One of those enjoying the input of Fiji's most-capped player is 16-year-old Maikah Dau, a softly spoken, silky midfielder whose father played alongside Krishna in the national team.

Dau, the youngest in the squad, says Krishna had given him plenty of encouragement.

"In the first game, he told me to go out there and just smile and just do what I do," he says.

Krishna says the players have a great opportunity to get "in the system" of professional football and "not just play in Oceania -- go abroad, go in Asia, go in Europe and follow your dreams".

"Anything is possible," he says, drawing on his own experience growing up in a rural farming community in Labasa, on Fiji's second-largest island.

"It doesn't matter where you live, in the island or in the interior or (where) there's no internet or nothing... it will only disappoint you if you don't work for it."

Krishna accepts he is entering his final playing years, even if physically he still has the same muscular build and low centre of gravity that have made him a robust but agile forward.

His advice for his younger teammates getting their first taste of professional football is simple. "I just want these young boys to enjoy every moment of it," he says.

W.Richard--SMC