Sunday, December 14, 2008

The one with the futsal tournament

Been a while since my last post. Things as usual haven't been all good. But nothing new there.
Anyways, yesterday I played in the Kelab Ambank Group (KAG) futsal tournament at Sports Planet Subang Grand. Been a while since my last tournament. Last I think was a couple of years back, when I played in the inter-Clark Hatch tournament.
This year around, I joined my friends in the internal audit department to form a team. For the men's open category, there were 32 teams divided into 8 groups of 4. Being our first tournament and first time playing together, we were happy if we made it out of the group phase.
I for one, was asked to play a defensive role. Not a role I fancied, but for the sake of the team, we all had to do our part. And I felt I did quite well especially in the first game, where nothing went past me.
I don't recall our opponents names, but for our first game, we won 2-0. And i had the honour of blasting our first goal in the tourney with a half-court blockbuster. That sent the team and crowd nuts.
Our second game, was a total collapse. Our star player was taken out with and ankle injury. And the whole team structure fell after that. We lost 1-6. We were outplayed in that game, and my lack of defensive instincts were exposed.
Our third and final group game was a do-or-die game. If we win, we advance, if we lost, we can pack our gear and head home. We won the game 3-2, and we could have won by a higher margin, but we hit the woodwork a lot. With that wine we advanced to the sweet sixteen (round of 16).
Our last game, was played at my familiar court. The court where my Wednesday group plays. But even that didn't help much as we lost 2-7. I scored another blockbuster to make the scores 1-2 to give hope to the team. But we were outgunned again. We won some fans during the tournament, probably due to our nice kit.
A good effort overall for first timers. Finished the tournament with 2 goals and some valuable experience.

back (l-r) - reza, farrish, wira, fatta, shahril, chris
front (l-r) - aizat, faisal

* picture courtesy of reza's facebook


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