After last year’s somewhat anticlimactic football season I think a lot of our team were looking forward to another chance at SAISA. Throughout the season we gained a lot of new players, and our team had a lot of new faces. I could feel that we were a lot more technical than last year in our passing, shooting and dribbling which was a positive sign from the start. However, because we weren’t able to play many games we never really gauged how good we were. WE played CIS once and that ended in a draw, however the conditions were really bad with torrential rain almost stopping the game. We then played the teachers and parents team  where we won6-4 but I still felt it wasn’t our best game. This meant we had to find out at Saisa. WE arrived a day early and because of that played our first game before the tournament had even formally started. I know a lot of our team wasn’t happy with this, because playing a game before the tournament starts in front of the home crowd puts a lot of pressure on us. We scored early, which was a shock because we scored from a throw in that took a deflection and rolled into the goal. For the rest of the first half we held possession and dominated pretty heavily. When the second half started Lincoln started fighting back but we still had control. The loudalmost drowning cheers of the home crowd also didn’t really help us. We conceded around 11 minutes in from an unexpected long range shot.

However similarly to the first half after this we took control, here’s when the first problem started. Because of the crowd, none of us really paid any attention to the clock or time remaining. We had some miscommunication in our box, nobody closed down their forward and he shot. Darius our goalkeeper got a hand to it but barely missed. We had conceded, it was at this point that we looked at the time left and saw that we were already in extra time. At this point a huge wave of panic just hit me. The clock kept ticking down, in the last play of the game I had the ball at the halfway line. I managed to skip around 2 players but at the edge of the box got slightly intercepted and threw off my shot. The whistle blew, 2-1, we had lost. The frustration hit me, we had dominated, and still lost. After the game we had a team talk where we discussed what we had to do going forward, until we realized the format of the tournament had completely messed us up. Because there was only one field, the top 3 teams of each group would play for positions 6 through 1, whereas the bottom 2 from each play for 7-10. We had lost to Lincoln, meaning even if we tied 3rd place with them on points we would lose on head to head. Looking back on it now, this really was unfortunate because our team had really gelled that first game and I do think if we had played it the next morning we could have won. But what could we do, we just had to move on and play our game.

The rest of the tournament was a bit of a blur, whilst I played significantly  better individually when compared to last year, the result we achieved did not reflect that. We had all of the tools to be a top 3 team, but our final finish at 9th didn’t reflect that potential we carried. I think all of us were disappointed, but if anything this served as a learning experience for us, and a source of motivation for next year. Looking back, the tournament spiraled the minute we played our first game that put us under unnecessary pressure, but there’s no point in having regrets now. Next year OSC will be hosting, and whilst we will lose 2 valuable players in Ethan and Antoine, I feel our squad will be more mature and ready to take our final shot, or at least my final shot at SAISA football glory.