South Africa 2010. No, it’s not the venue of the World Cup 2010, but the winner of the ‘United Cup 2010’, the yearly six-a-side football championship for foreign-residents organized by the New Delhi United Football Club.
It was an extraordinarily well organized event: 16 teams representing 15 different countries of 4 continents (from Chile to Bangladesh, from Tanzania to Malaysia, from Austria to Malawi just to name a few) + us, the World Team (2 Irish, 2 Colombians, 1 Brazilian, 1 Argentinean, 1 French, 1 Ethiopian, 1 Kazakh, and of course 1 Italian). 4 Groups of 4 team each. Qualifying rounds, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final. Sponsors. National anthems at the beginning of each match. 1,500 US$ prize money. VIPs. Fireworks during the prize-giving...
And, in a way, our tournament has been truly epical. It had a bit of everything: thrilling and glory moments for an unhoped recovery and a last-minute win, the controversy for a bad referee decision, the pathos and the drama of the penalty shoot-outs, and, unfortunately, the bad luck in some key moments...
Passed the qualifying round as second-best team in our group thanks to the goal-difference (actually this happened last week-end, when we were in Kashmir), we won our quarter-final against Israel on Friday in an epic match, during which we had a terrific comeback from 0-3 to 5-3 in the last 15 minutes. It was a particularly sweet victory, as Israel played a very rough game. Their players (skinhead he-men - certainly from the Mossad!) seemed in fact more focused on tackling our ankles and challenging any referee's decision than on scoring in our goal. But precisely because of that, in the end the victory had a very sweet taste...
The semi-final against Gambia on the contrary was a paean to bad luck. Ahead 2-0 with only 5 minutes left after a match that - without rhetoric - we dominated, we were reached at the last minute because of an unfortunate deflection of one of us in our own goal. We eventually lost at the penalty shoot-outs, but can rightly complain for a ball that bounced behind the line of the Gambian goal that the referee didn’t convalidate. If we only had the instant replay!
We finally easily won the final for the 3rd place against Russia (3-1) in a match that left in us a lot of regrets: “Ah, if we had played catenaccio the last five minutes of the semis!”. But with only one Italian in the team, this was not possible...
Anyway, beside the bruises and the entertainment of the past days, I leave this tournament with the feeling of having found in my team mates a group of very nice people - with whom I easily got along and with whom I feel I could hang out in the future...
And in fact tomorrow, 8 am, I’ll be again on a football pitch playing with them. We need to start working hard to prepare the next tournment...
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