“Losing is essential to anyone’s success. The more you lose, the more you want to win” – Brett Hull

The team’s exploitation to football came earlier than expected, a tournament that included 12 international schools across Sri Lanka. We were excited by this opportunity where we could play with a team filled with young and new players. In other words, an opportunity to build chemistry for SAISA which was 4 months away.

The first game was with Lyceum Panadura, who ended up being the finalists of the tournament. Our team missed out essential players like Harry, Kaalep and Joshua where they were needed as they played important positions in our team. But we moved forward with the team we had, still confident and excited about the game. As the captain, I was not that optimistic… The game ended 3:1 and it even though we didn’t get the result we wanted we showed moments of great football.

The next game was with CISK (Colombo international school of Kandy), the game did not go through as the team did not show up, therefore getting a walkthrough. Straight after that, we were facing GCK (Gateway College Kandy), a tough fixture as we met similar faces from 2 years ago. This was the first match where we had the full team and this bought confidence to the team.

The game turned out to be a mud pit as the weather did not help our playing style at all. First half we scored 2 and were already afoot closer to the quarterfinals of the tournament. But the game turned around, as the opponents scored 3 goals and we were suddenly behind. We started to attack with urgency every single time we got the ball. I hit the post twice at the end of the game and all our efforts were either saved or off target. A hard-fought game but sometimes losing is something we should accept as a team.