by Michael
August, World Cup time – oops…. In fact it was planned to play this tournament in July, but only 2 teams were available in July so the tournament was delayed until August. But August did not show up as a much better date – only 5 teams finally competed on the last weekend, namely United Nations (aka Scans and some other players), Thailand, The Commonwealth, England and Germany.
We were looking forward to this tournament – 12 players confirmed – sounded great. But as happened in the last few months, we had a few very late cancellations and again no-shows. Luckily our President Hartwig aka Otto showed up and so we had a least 3 subs. First game vs England – a “Klassiker” as said by our “Kaiser”. But it was not – we did everything wrong in this game one can imagine. At the end we were quite ok just to end up with a 0:2 loss – could be much worse. Second game vs. The Commonwealth – yes sounds more like Cricket but we played football – at least they did in the first minutes – we not at all. Same problem as the game before. Early in the game they scored and shortly after, they got a penalty shot awarded. So we were close to a two goal deficit. But – penalties and German teams are an own story – our goalie Michael managed to stop the penalty and this was the turning point of the game. Two goals from Ivan and Gerd saved us a 2:1 win in that game. The next two games vs. Thailand and the United Nations were not successful again – 0:2 and 1:3 – so we ended up on the 4th place in the qualification round.
According to the specific rules on that day we needed to play a playoff game with the 5th seeded to determine which team will be the real number 4. Again we clashed with The Commonwealth Team. Hard fight, close game and a winning goal from Ivan secured us the 4th place again and brought us into the semi-finals. Opponent ??? Again England – as German teams do naturally get better and better during tournaments, the England Team was quite scared to face us again. And we did much better than in the first game. England scored due to an individual mistake early in the game but the rest of the game was ours. We fought, we run, we had our chances but – we did finally not score at all. A very close loss and a very disappointed team. We were very close to make it into the penalty shoot-out or then even to the final but it was definitely not our lucky day.
The final was England – Thailand, we faced again the United Nations in our 3rd game this afternoon to determine the 4th place of the tournament. But we were just done – three more players injured, the rest disappointed and sad – no chance to win this one. We lost but we were proud to finish until the final whistle and as usual we all had a great time on the pitch and after the games at the beer booth. World Cup Champion finally was Thailand, Congratulations !!!
Despite the upcoming thunderstorms that evening we helped EG and the other teams to finish the beer – which was not an easy task with only 5 teams. But as usual we like these challenges. Next Vets Tournament is in early September and we hope that enough players sign up and also will finally be at the pitch. Cheers!!!