First Football
The Saturday after I flew into town the Eagles organised a practice game so that I could start to get used to local conditions and the team. At 5:30am in the morning we left the AIA camp and drove to another college, MCC, half way back to the city. I hadn’t got much sleep for the reasons discussed previously so was feeling pretty tired when we arrived at a pretty little ground in amongst the college's fairly large grounds (there were even deer in the grounds and one ran across the field after the game). The field itself wasn’t quite as green. In fact there were only a few patches of grass and the rest was very hard brown rock and small stones. The match was against the Netaji club who are in the division above the Eagles (the top flight of state football).
I started off in midfield as part of Robin’s desire to see if I could direct the team from there. What we learned by that experiment was that a slightly unfit Australian who is unused to conditions and doesn’t know the players names around him is pretty ineffective as a holding midfielder and I got tired pretty quickly. Due to interchange being used I came off after 25 minutes in order to get some breath back before the 2nd half. I played most of that half up front which was a much gentler way to get used to the conditions. The humidity at 8:30 in the morning was still pretty shocking. In fact but for my inability to get used to the incredibly irregular bounce and the fact that I couldn’t get enough purchase on the ground to turn and accelerate properly I could have had a couple of goals. In the end we lost 3-0 but a couple of goals probably wouldn’t have counted if their coach wasn’t referee. It was a good taste of the football here and I felt like given a bit of time to acclimatise I could definitely have an impact here. The players are individually reasonably good but don’t work together well as a team and often made fairly basic mistakes.
The first official Eagles match was on Monday (a different start date again from what I had last heard). Unfortunately my papers still haven’t come through from Australia so I was forced to watch the game from the bench. All the games in the league take place in the Nehru Stadium in the middle of the city. It can seat about 20-30,000 so is a pretty impressive place to play games. For most football matches the spectators probably don’t even fill 1% of it. There is far more grass on the surface than any other field I’ve seen in the area but is still pretty rutted under that superficial surface. Normally Division 1 occurs at 2pm prior to the Senior Division at 3:45pm. However, as it was the first day of the season and the Senior Division hadn’t started yet the Eagles match was at 3:45pm. This made it even more frustrating to be sitting on the bench as the weather was perfect for football with a light breeze keeping the humidity as good as it has been since I’ve arrived. The team played well against a much weaker team and came away with a resounding 6-0 win. It’s a great start to the season and almost enough for me to decide that they don’t need me and come home. They assure me that other teams in the division will pose more of a challenge but it was good for the players confidence to get a good win and gave the coaching staff a chance to try a few things and encourage the team to work on things like it’s shape and passing without major pressure. It was also encouraging for me to see how the team prayed before and after the game and took time out of their preparations to hear from a short devotional.
Overall my first few days here have been reasonable from a ‘footballing’ perspective – I’ll be more relaxed once the transfer goes through. The team are a great bunch of guys who are keen to learn and who I think I’ll enjoy playing with. There’s also an opportunity to push myself by training with Robin’s Senior Division team – Customs. More importantly the Eagles contain both non-Christian players who I am sure God has put in the team to hear the gospel and young Christians who God is just starting to awaken to the possibilities of service through football. I just pray I can have a role in serving both these groups.
I started off in midfield as part of Robin’s desire to see if I could direct the team from there. What we learned by that experiment was that a slightly unfit Australian who is unused to conditions and doesn’t know the players names around him is pretty ineffective as a holding midfielder and I got tired pretty quickly. Due to interchange being used I came off after 25 minutes in order to get some breath back before the 2nd half. I played most of that half up front which was a much gentler way to get used to the conditions. The humidity at 8:30 in the morning was still pretty shocking. In fact but for my inability to get used to the incredibly irregular bounce and the fact that I couldn’t get enough purchase on the ground to turn and accelerate properly I could have had a couple of goals. In the end we lost 3-0 but a couple of goals probably wouldn’t have counted if their coach wasn’t referee. It was a good taste of the football here and I felt like given a bit of time to acclimatise I could definitely have an impact here. The players are individually reasonably good but don’t work together well as a team and often made fairly basic mistakes.
The first official Eagles match was on Monday (a different start date again from what I had last heard). Unfortunately my papers still haven’t come through from Australia so I was forced to watch the game from the bench. All the games in the league take place in the Nehru Stadium in the middle of the city. It can seat about 20-30,000 so is a pretty impressive place to play games. For most football matches the spectators probably don’t even fill 1% of it. There is far more grass on the surface than any other field I’ve seen in the area but is still pretty rutted under that superficial surface. Normally Division 1 occurs at 2pm prior to the Senior Division at 3:45pm. However, as it was the first day of the season and the Senior Division hadn’t started yet the Eagles match was at 3:45pm. This made it even more frustrating to be sitting on the bench as the weather was perfect for football with a light breeze keeping the humidity as good as it has been since I’ve arrived. The team played well against a much weaker team and came away with a resounding 6-0 win. It’s a great start to the season and almost enough for me to decide that they don’t need me and come home. They assure me that other teams in the division will pose more of a challenge but it was good for the players confidence to get a good win and gave the coaching staff a chance to try a few things and encourage the team to work on things like it’s shape and passing without major pressure. It was also encouraging for me to see how the team prayed before and after the game and took time out of their preparations to hear from a short devotional.
Overall my first few days here have been reasonable from a ‘footballing’ perspective – I’ll be more relaxed once the transfer goes through. The team are a great bunch of guys who are keen to learn and who I think I’ll enjoy playing with. There’s also an opportunity to push myself by training with Robin’s Senior Division team – Customs. More importantly the Eagles contain both non-Christian players who I am sure God has put in the team to hear the gospel and young Christians who God is just starting to awaken to the possibilities of service through football. I just pray I can have a role in serving both these groups.
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