From a small Yorkshire village six miles outside Barnsley to the football grounds of Kuching, Alan Vest lived one of the most improbable journeys the game has produced. A prolific non-league goalscorer who swapped the round ball for the oval one at a rugby-mad grammar school, Vest built a coaching life across three continents. He captained New Zealand, became Western Australias first Director of Coaching, took charge of Newcastle KB United in the National Soccer League, and came within a whisker of the Socceroos job. But it was on the island of Borneo that he wrote his most extraordinary chapter. Handed a relegated, unfancied Sarawak side, Vest turned them into champions of Malaysia and won the lasting reverence of a state that still remembers him as the White Rajah of its football — a bond so deep he asked for his ashes to be scattered along the Kuching waterfront where he took his morning walks. Begun by Alan himself and completed by his son Chris from a lifetime of papers, match reports and the memories of those who played for him, this is a story of ambition, discipline and adventure, and of a love for the game that carried one man far further than he ever imagined.
