The futsal game I’m talking about is hosted by the IAC of the school and is an annual intramural competition between various teams in the school. The ASEC squad is the reigning champion and I was lucky enough to be able to play with a team of such skilled people. For those of you who don’t have any idea futsal is a five-a-side indoor football/soccer game that was developed about a hundred years ago. Futsal is the alternative game for football fanatics who want to play the game that they like anywhere and anytime.
As the players and spectators began to slowly enter the court I could not help but notice that today’s game would not be a walk in a park. My team was fresh from a 8-4 victory but the team that we were facing now looked like they were veterans and knew what they were doing. We could not afford complacency nor must we get too overconfident because we might be defeated. Little did I know that we were in for something really challenging.
The time came for the players to warm-up. I began my warming-up by stretching my muscles and getting my mind into game mode. Next I practiced my spot kicking and one-two passing. Two of the most important aspects you must have in this game are accuracy and quickness especially when it came to free kicks, passing, and shooting. In futsal, as in any other game practice makes perfect and I was not just about to take it for granted by just standing idly near the court and doing nothing productive.
4:30 p.m.: GAME TIME! I was sweating already even though the game was just starting. Playing as a right winger I had to play both offense and defense, luckily the court wasn’t that big and all I had to do when we lost ball possession was run as fast as I could back to my designated area. The game started out a bit tough for me since I was still getting the jitter coming from playing against players who were much much more experienced than me, after playing for about 3 minutes I was substituted off the game in order to reassess our opponents and work a way of somehow overcoming them.
Throughout the next 3 to 4 minutes or so our team conceded 2 goals and scored none, it was like hell seeing your team getting beaten up yet knowing that you can’t do anything about it. With about 11 minutes still to play, meaning 9 minutes have gone by in the first half, I came back into the game and decided to switch to a sweeper/stopper position, which is basically the primary defensive position in a team, in order to get some of the load off the other team members so that they can be free to attack. Our most skilled teammate, trusting that I had the back covered, began an all out assault against our opponent. We were down 2-0 but we knew that we can still make it and win this game. A spectacular play by one my teammates resulted into a beautiful goal on the other end, and we pulled back one to place the score to 2-1. Although we managed to pull 1 back they were able to respond and after a series of awesome plays from both ends the 1st half ended with our team trailing 4-1, a very bleak score line indeed!
The second half began with my team realizing that if we don’t get our act together and start to perform as a team we could end up in defeat. I started the half by sitting it out since I played a lot of minutes in the first half.
Finally getting into the game at 8 minutes left and a score of 5-2 against our team, I decided to play a little bit of playmaker/sweeper so that our team could at least tie or even pull back some points. I did a particularly superb play, at least that’s what I think about it, when the opposing team gave up a free kick. I took the indirect free kick and by aiming a well placed lob pass towards one of my teammates he was able to score with such brilliance that it could have taken your breath away had you seen it. I then decided to initiate a series of plays aimed at targeting our opponents’ weakness, which was their inability to come back fast enough after the attack thus making them vulnerable to counter-attacking.
With 4 minutes left in the game and a 5-3 score line that was definitely against us we were entering desperation time! But instead of creating highlight plays we committed a lot of errors which in turn sealed our faith and gifted our opponents with another score.
Our teams last act of showing that we have not totally giving up was a spectacular play that was started with my defensive stop; I quickly passed saw an opportunity for a counter attack and immediately passed to the right wing.
What happened next was absolutely superb! A cross from the right wing accurately placed the ball into the tenacious feet of our forward and he shot the ball, in a way that all goal keepers found hard to defend against, hard and low into the bottom corner. The play was beautiful but the ugly truth of it all was that we were down 2 goals with the score at the final whistle at 6-4. We fought valiantly but in the end it was our errors and lack of more players that contributed to our defeat. We were saddened yet we assured ourselves that we could bounce back from this. It was, after all, our first defeat and all we had to do was absorb it and just play better in our next games.
While cooling off in the shower rooms a quote famously said by Michael Caine in the movie “Batman Begins” and it goes like this; “Why do we fall Master Bruce? We fall in order to learn how to pick ourselves up”. This quote would surely propel me through my next game and hopefully I would help my team win it this time.
Getting up after removing my shin guards I said to myself : "Its okay, win or lose I still love this game!"
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