Rant 13: the Un-LUCKY ones, Part 1 # our first steps

I guess the universally unlucky number had to be the one that told of My football team. I'm sorry if i sound a tad selfish when I say that. In my final year, i found a totally new outlook on football here, (sports itself) which is very indicative of the power of mind over body.
First year:-
we were 5 of us,

Shaz (an excellent Tennis player as well, he and i have our own "hollywood" script about that sport),

Akhilesh (I called him Crazy Legs , like a frikin roadrunner!),

Norten (awesome guitarist as well as footballer, still cant forget that first five a side),

Pady (another awesome striker, he scored mic's first competitive goal ever)

and me from our batch. There were others who tried playing. And try they did, from the cultural rep of our class to others with really strong "capacities".

our first practice with the seniors was quite impresssive for us. we were beating them at 5 a side quite easily i guess. We were warned countless times about prior performances, mostly from Captain, Tamal, who was then in 3rd year. A chill goes down my spine hearing numbers like 10, 12.
Nevertheless, the five i mentioned stuck it out for the better part of our first year, and we had some great times.
Minor ones include the precious few practice sessions in the morning. Manipal in the Odd sem is all Rain and no gain, however, the mornings are quite pleasant in that respect. Slush and mud made up those practices but we definitely honed our long ball and trapping skills to the fullest. Even Tamal joined us for a couple of sessions.
One glorious match that comes to mind is the first five a side that we played on the 10th Block basketball court. I played goalie in that and i got my fair share of knocks on the face! The whole game as such is a bit of a blur, but we were trailing 3-1 towards the end. It's about ten mins per half, and just when i had lost all hope, Norten came up with two of the sweetest struck goals in street football i had seen. both in the top corner meant we were into penalties. I remember running up to celebrate like mad when we were finally level, everyone was jumping and hugging norten like crazy.
the penalty shootout(which was basically shooting from one end of the court to another into goal). All the euphoria and relief that we felt from equalising was washed down as none of us were able to score. the good thing was, only one from the opposing team was able to score. still it was a crushing end to such a brilliant performance...unlucky!

Sadly, we were unable to carry the good bit of that into the Inter-MAHE and Revels tournaments in 06-07. 6-0, and 5-0 i think were the resepective scores. Our defence was a testamemt to the word "patched". I got badly scratched as the ground was pretty fucked and they made a helluva lot of attacks on goal. our midfield and attack did a fair job considering what practice we'd done.

I guess thats the story of first year.

to be continued...