Valdas Dambrauskas can reel off the questions and answers without a moment’s pause. Who won the first Academy Award for best actor in 1929? It was Emil Jannings, even if someone else might have been tempted to go with Charlie Chaplin.
Which country publishes the highest number of daily newspapers? India was the clear winner. Can you name the nation that produces the most electricity per capita in the world?
His family, watching back home, clasped heads in hands but he was right: back then, in 2002, the answer was his native Lithuania. It was enough to win Dambrauskas about £725 in his appearance on Six Zeros – A Million, the Lithuanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? But my plan was to go to England and follow my dream to become a coach, and that’s how it started.” More than two and a half decades later the story continues at Old Trafford where Dambrauskas will manage the Azerbaijani champions, Sabah, in their Champions League debut on Thursday night.
The club’s journey is some tale in itself given Sabah, who came through a dramatic playoff with Hapoel Be’er Sheva, did not exist until 2017. But the path taken by their head coach, a 25-year-old office worker with only a modest football background when his general knowledge skills were put on display, is virtually unparalleled in the modern game. The money he won helped Dambrauskas and his girlfriend, now wife, to move to north London and establish themselves in an alien environment.
In Scandinavia he had grasped the extent of the Premier League’s incipient popularity. There was no pathway to coaching in Lithuania if you hadn’t been a player; it was impossible. But if I could take a course in England, maybe I could get a chance to step on the ladder at home.” Dambrauskas spent eight years in London.
I wasn’t speaking decent English, had no contacts, we didn’t know anyone, we lived in different places, did all kinds of jobs.” He worked in a Muswell Hill pub, delivered newspapers in the area, held down jobs in a nursery school, as a gardener, in sales, and as a self-employed handyman, often simultaneously. The hours were relentless but so was the young man’s focus. It was a life of an immigrant couple straining every sinew to make their way.
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