Season 2 of SAISA sports has started, bringing me to my second season after playing Volleyball in the first season. After our very successful run in SAISA Volleyball, I was more than ready to try another team sport. It is a really nice chance to be able to be a part of the football SAISA team, as least year I wasn’t able to travel despite training with the team the whole year 🥲. But at least this time I was more than ready to start playing football. 14 girls tried out for the team, which is actually the full team capacity, but two dropped out, so we have 12 players for the team. Now, playing a 7-aside this means we have a lot of extra substitutes (thank god because my fitness levels are honestly terrible and its even worse in Sri Lankan tropical weather) and especially since I am a winger I have to do the most running up and down the field (yay…) Anyways, our trainings consisted of lots of drills and a half an hour or so long friendly game at the end, and these games got longer as we practiced more and more (since SAISA has 25 minutes halves) Pretty soon we had our first game against Gateway. Even though we hadn’t trained for long, we still won 5:0, as we took the skills that we learnt in practice and applied them in the game. One thing that we did need to work on (and especially me) was our confidence. When it got to actually scoring the goal and being there in the box, we never took the chanced that we had to just try to score a goal. Our second game was against Lyceum, and this was also quite an easy win. In the end it was a 8:0 win, and you could already see the improvement from game to game. Then we also played against CIS, and this turned out to be a 7:0 win, and when we tried out an 11 aside game against them (surprisingly much less running for me, yay!!) we also won 2:0. This was really great for us because even though we had never practised 11 aside, we were able to transfer our skills and formations just onto a bigger pitch.
The next day came one of our game changers (literally) we were going to play an 18+ girls football academy, which had several players in the national team. Of course we were all scared, and we had reason to be, but we went in with a strong mindset and a willingness to prove ourselves. Unfortunately it didn’t really work out in our favor and we lost 7:0, which was actually quite ironic since we won 7:0 on Friday, but then lost 7:0 on Saturday. Even though we lost quite bad, and we held our heads up high. It was a great learning experience, because after this game we changed our formation from a 2-3-1 (which is much more offensive based and leans heavily on the wingers to bring the ball up and down, and help out in defense) to a 3-1-2 formation (this formation is much more defense based, and uses the center midfield player much more, as the wingers or strikers in this context, stay up) Personally, I quite like the defense formation more (no, its not only because I have to run less (it is one of the reasons)) because it is much more effective with better teams that we would play in SAISA, who are very strong in the offensive side. It allows our team to create channels and have a strong defensive wall.
As of right now, SAISA starts tomorrow (yes I know its a little late for a pre-SAISA post, but it IS still technically pre-SAISA) and I am very excited but equally as nervous since we are playing on home ground. There are a lot of expectations for us, but I’m sure with the help of the home crowd, and our confidence, we will be able to come top 3 in the competition 🙂