I love the Beautiful Game

The most popular sport in my primary school was actually basketball. Every boy joined the basketball club, it didn't matter if you were athletic, hopelessly clumsy or didn't care for the game at all. Our school always ended first or second in our zone area, losing only to Nan Hua whose team was full of stocky dudes, restricting our attacks to only speculative shots outside the zone. I remember wearing the number 13 jersey, which meant I wasn't a star player. But we stayed back everyday after school and played till late in the evening, meaning a scolding/beating awaited back home.

On a fateful day in primary five, soccer entered my life as another group of schoolmates got me into a game of void deck soccer. Like most people, I started off as a defender but as we mostly played on the field, my stamina quickly pushed me to take up a place in midfield. Now here's something that not many of you will be able to boast; I actually played a game which was captured on video! It was a classmate's birthday and his dad came down after the party to flim the game on his videocam. During those days, we all had fake jersey replicas; England, Germany, Argentina, etc.. I still have my tiny England replica with me:

When I entered secondary school, it took quite a bit of trouble to get my new classmates to play a game of soccer. To my horror, we played our first game with a rubber ball bought at the mama shop! Anyway, we eventually had 6 to 8 guys who would play every sunday at a basketball court at Queenstown after swimming. That was fun! We also formed a team and we wore a blue jersey with red shorts. There was a 'training bust-up' incident between myself and Benedict, where I threw my jersey into the dustbin after leaving the court in anger, haha.. Although we played mostly on the basketball court due to the lack of players, we managed the occasional game at the Telok Blangah field which was so muddy that your boots would get stuck in the the mud.. Looking back, I was a very selfish player who dribbled the ball with my head down and could have passed the darn ball more often, haha..

I seriously believe I spent more time on the basketball court playing soccer than the lecture theatres during my JC days.. Almost everyone in my class was nuts about football and there were enough players in our class alone to form a team! And we were a bloody good team as well, not once did we lose a match for 2 years in JC, including a classic 4-3 comeback after trailing 0-3 at half-time!

There is so much to crap about soccer so I'll continue some other day, gonna sleep now.. Here are some footie links:

Freestyle Soccer

Great Soccer Moves