Oops…they did it again …(almost!) – Vets Tournament October 2013

written by Dirk

For October’s Vet’s tournament we were blessed with perfect football weather: Drizzle (which, however, later turned into torrential floods) and the sun hid perfectly away from us. Due to the heavy rainfalls the previous days we had to change the location, though not far away, and had the dubious honor to play on AstroTurf. If that would be so healthy for our knees and backs? But what the heck, we are all tough guys and can manage to play on every surface available! Our aim was of course the defending of last month’s glorious victory. That this would be a difficult task was clear to all of us and many of the other teams were very eager to bring the cup home by themselves.

The GAS team consisted this time of eleven players, therefore we played eight and against eight on the pitch, we had three substitutes at the disposal, good enough for us. Unfortunately we were not able to win the first two games, drew 1:1 and 2:2. We should have taken the advantage, because our opponents were not necessarily the strongest ones. The third game we even lost 1:2 and we were all sure that this was definitely not enough for getting into the next round. But we are the GAS Vets, and we are famous for pulling ourselves together, and that was what we did, to finally win the last of the group games against BU Japan with a clear 2:0.

A quite big surprise was that we actually were second in our group, despite all last three of the group had the same points, but we had one goal more than the others. That clearly shows how important each and every goal is! So, we moved into the semifinal and expected once again our “nemesis” (not negatively!), the Bangkok Refugees. This team was beaten by us twice the previous month, however unlucky for them because of the controversial sliding rule. It seemed that this time the luck was on their side, because this time we were the victims of this bizarre regulation. After a totally normal defense action by Torbjoern we received the maybe most ridiculous penalty against us ever. Fact is that, whenever you lose your balance and fall onto the ground, the rule is applied. It has nothing to do with football at all, but it seems that a change of this rule is out of reach…

So we lost 1:2 but didn’t give up the fight, we still had the chance to catch up silverware. We focused on the game for the third place and had to play Royal barge, a futsal team consisting of many fast and small, technical quite brilliant, Thais. After a long and wet fight we once again had to go into extra time and once again Yilmaz made the golden goal and let us celebrate silverware again ( even though in form of a coupon, but that counts also as silverware!) Soaked, tired but happy we met traditionally with the other teams at the beer booth, had lots of fun and celebrated as usual!

Special thanks to our guest player Andre who showed up some nice football skills and of course to our interim coach Gerd, who motivated us almost in a “Hasi style”! In this tournament we were able to make nine goals in six games, a pretty good yield, but we also got eight against us, so maybe we know now, where to focus in the future. Nevertheless it was a wet but funny and exciting football afternoon and the aim for next month’s tournament should be the top positions again!