398: Francisco Calvo, Costa Rica, FIFA World Cup Russia 2018, Panini Official Licensed Sticker Album

Special thanks today to my old housemate, Steven Noble, who spotted this out and about. Apologies if I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent here mate.

The Covid-19 enforced lockdown has starved us of social contact and encouraged us to rely increasingly on less traditional forms of communication. Whilst the majority of Britain’s population leant heavily on existing social media platforms and hastily developed meeting apps, others turned to more creative forms of reaching out to their local community. For example, in Walthamstow, a resident arborist has provided chalk annotations on the pavement next to the area’s trees while someone else has lovingly knitted a range of outfits for bollards indicating a one-way system. East London at its trendiest.

Nearly 130 miles away in Poundbury, Dorset, someone else has taken to their local bollards in order to send a message. Sitting proudly at the end of a street is the image of Costa Rican defender Francisco Calvo. Why might this be? There are over 5000 miles between Costa Rica and Dorset and the Central American side hardly lit up the 2018 World Cup in Russia. This would be the ideal case for Leddersford Town manager Steve Barnes but sadly he appears to have retired from his detective work so it’ll just be me and Wikipedia.

Franciso Calvo was born in the Costa Rican capital of San Jose in 1992. A year later the construction of Poundbury began on the lands of the Duchy of Cornwall with the aim to provide aesthetically pleasing housing for up to 6,000 people by the year 2025. The current Duke of Cornwall, Prince Charles, has been actively engaged in the design of the development and, while criticised by some for its artificial nostaligia, Poundbury has been praised for its adherence to traditional local architectural features. In 2018 Oliver Wainwright of The Guardian stated that, despite being “mocked as a feudal Disneyland”, Poundbury was home to a “growing and diverse community”. Sadly, evidence of the presence of a Costa Rican community in the area was not forthcoming.

Since making his professional debut in 2011 Francisco Calvo has spent the entirety of his playing career in his native Costa Rica and the United States. He has earned 50 caps for his country and been part of two World Cup squads. He was an unused substitute when Costa Rica played out a drab 0-0 draw with England to end the latter’s disappointing 2014 World Cup campaign but played the entire 90 minutes in a warm up game against the same opposition in 2018. England ran out 2-0 winners that day but perhaps Calvo did enough to impress someone in the Dorset area as he faced the challenge of keeping Marcus Rashford and Jamie Vardy quiet at Elland Road.

At 25 years old he was the youngest man in Costa Rica’s side for their opening game of the 2018 World Cup where they went down 1-0 to Serbia but was relegated to the bench for their 2-0 loss to Brazil, where a typically melodramatic Neymar and Philippe Coutinho only secured victory in injury time. Calvo’s 20 minute cameo in this match was not enough to earn him any game time in their final group stage clash with Switzerland but, perhaps, his stoicism in the face of Neymar’s histrionics won over the hearts and minds of the residents of Dorset’s newest development.

To be honest it’s highly likely that someone in Poundbury finally lost patience with the number of doubles they were getting and decided to commit Francisco Calvo’s image to the nearest bollard but where’s the fun in that story? It’s likely we will never find out the true explanation for the appearance of an obscure defender in a small town in Dorset but, for now at least, in one street of the Prince’s Poundbury it will always be Costa Rica.