John Love from Afghanistan shows his ball skills at practice for the Homeless World Cup team. Photo / Brett Phibbs

John Love from Afghanistan shows his ball skills at practice for the Homeless World Cup team. Photo / Brett Phibbs

They turn out for the soccer practice in jeans, shorts and boxers.

Some are young - an asylum seeker just arrived from Afghanistan, a fit young Maori/Jamaican "trying to be independent", a wiry guy with glasses who was kicked out of his last flat when his benefit stopped, and a tall, tousle-haired 34-year-old who takes Thursdays off work at what used to be called a sheltered workshop so he can play soccer.

There's Andrew Mangham, a slim, bearded 39-year-old poet on medication for schizophrenia:

Hail to the Queen
Welcome on the team
- of football, of course!

And there's an older group - a quiet man who stands rigidly at his post as goalkeeper, and a big, jovial 48-year-old who describes himself as just "down on my luck" after domestic problems.

This motley crew, shuffling gingerly on to a frosty field at Auckland's Cornwall Park early on Thursday, could be in line to represent New Zealand for the first time at a life-changing event - the Homeless World Cup.

"The idea is to publicise the issue of homelessness to the wider population and to use football as a catalyst for change for the individuals who are playing," says Stephen McLuckie, an Englishman who recently joined the former Methodist Mission in Queen St, now renamed Lifewise.

He has taken teams from Liverpool, with a coach from the famous Manchester United, to the past three Homeless World Cups in Edinburgh, Capetown and Copenhagen.

He and another English expat, Katie Owen in Wellington, are seeking sponsors through a new trust called Street Football Aotearoa to send the first Kiwi players to the next Homeless World Cup in Melbourne this December.

Working with the homeless, he says, has always had "a soup-kitchen ethos".

"We are trying to move away from that - giving people things to do to start moving away from homelessness. Football is just one of those activities.

"We are also looking to get different clubs going - a gardening project, chess mornings and women's mornings."

Sam Sami, 47, a Fiji-born support worker at the Salvation Army's Epsom Lodge for about 90 men, jumped at the chance of a Homeless World Cup team when it was first reported in the Herald last month. He put up a notice at the lodge and gathered a group of about eight.