By Lucas Quick – Spear Reporter | Cameron Cook (left) and Arnold Matshazi (right) talk during warmups before their game against Utah Tech on Oct. 10.
San Jose State soccer teammates Cameron Cook and Arnold Matshazi’s story begins long before becoming Spartans.
Their beginnings start across the pond in Milton Keynes, England. They both attended the same secondary school, grabbed Nando’s chicken and became lifelong-soccer teammates.
“We just laugh at everything whenever we’re together,” Matshazi said of their friendship. “We can genuinely make a moment on it out of everything.”
Cook is now in his second semester at SJSU while Matshazi is in his first.
Both of them played for AFC Dunstable, an English non-league soccer club, but at different times. Cook previously was a midfielder for the team.
During that time, Cook’s AFC Dunstable’s joint managers Joe Oxley and James Townsend mentioned that they were looking for a striker and Cook went on to vouch for Matshazi.
“I told the coach I honestly don’t think he’d come out there, but you can try,” Cook said.
Matshazi found himself playing in AFC Dunstable a couple of phone calls later. Around the same time, Cook departed to San Jose during last spring semester.
Matshazi went on to score 13 goals in 16 appearances and led AFC Dunstable in just one season.
This was his third team in three seasons, with Dunstable giving him the best opportunity to succeed in a new environment.
“It felt like a weight off my shoulder, which resulted in me scoring a lot of goals,” Matshazi said. “I wanted to obviously go there and score goals but I wanted to make sure that I’m enjoying what I do.”
Cook took it as his mission to get Matshazi to America.
“I was sending him Snapchats every day of the palm trees around campus saying, ‘You wouldn’t find anything like this in England,’” Cook said. “You wouldn’t be waking up at 7 a.m. and it’s 25 degrees Celsius outside.”
Having never left England, there was some skepticism for Matshazi, and making a decision to come to America was a big investment.
He said he feared the unknown and questioned if SJSU was as good or better than what he had at home.
That’s where Cook would be a useful source of information.
“If it wasn’t good, I would fully believe Cam would tell me,” Matshazi said. “He wouldn’t make me waste my time to come over like this.”
Before joining AFC Dunstable, Cook spent most of his soccer career with the Milton Keynes Dons, a League Two team in the English Football League.
He started playing at their youth academy at eight years old. Being let go was a humbling experience for Cook, who had spent eight years with the club.
“It was a difficult period because I was there for a long time,” Cook said. “My whole life was kind of based around being at the club.”
This would become a blessing in disguise for Cook, as he was getting new opportunities in different atmospheres.
Cook and Matshazi simply saw the change of coming to America as a weight lifted off their shoulders in comparison to their careers back home.
The pair felt that America provided a fresh start to focus on the present and not have to worry about the pressure they had back home.
“Back in England, it would kind of feel like I was in a stagnant cycle where I’m playing well but nothing’s really coming for me in terms of opportunity,” Matshazi said. “And that’s where it starts to take control of you.”
Stakes and tensions were notably high in Milton Keynes and it makes a lot of sense when England’s most popular sport is soccer.
Aside from soccer, the next couple of years in the Bay Area was an opportunity for a new lifestyle.
SJSU head coach Simon Tobin said he visited Milton Keynes to recruit the pair.
“It’s gonna get to the point, I hope, where we have nine Northern California kids and two kids from the same town in England every start,” Tobin said.
Tobin said he expects the freshmen to be valuable pieces of the team for years to come.
“There’s a lot of people who I’ve spoken to back home who had done it before and they said it was the best three, four years of their life,” Matshazi said. “Milton Keynes will always be Milton Keynes, but I may not be able to experience America in the way that I’m coming.”
The two teammates have been such important companions to each other’s lives, giving advice on and off the field from Milton Keynes to San Jose.
“As much as he’s my mate, he’s someone who’s a bit older than me,” Cook said. “And I’ve always looked up to him in terms of how he carries himself.”
The two teammates have gone from playing on rugged pitches back in their hometown to the Spartan Soccer Complex in a little over a decade.
“We’re doing what we love and we’ve been doing since we were younger,” Matshazi said. “And now we’re doing it together in America. It’s really a blessing.”
