Veni, Vidi, Vici ...

This weekend, the London international tournament took place. This year, GEKKO decided to join in on the fun and go with a team of 7 players to represent the club.

The tournament started in a mess with heavy rain when driving in France, but the sky cleared when we were taking the boat and everything was dry in Britain. We put up our tents and went to sleep, as it was already quite late (even with the gained hour from travelling from the mainland to Great Britain).

The next day, our first match was against Odd Socks. We never played against them before and didn't quite know what to expect, but the results show enough. Something like 8 to 1 in our favor when the final whiste was blown.

Next, probably the most difficult match scheduled for the day, was Blakedown.
We fought hard and till the end, and finally, with a score of 3 to 2, we were able to control the ball for the last 4 minutes of the game and victory was ours.

The final match for the day was against FOA (Friends of Allonby?) and was easily won with 7 to 1 I think.

All the games won made us end 1ste in our group. The next day we came out against the second of another group, which was AKKC Antwerp (again, we seem to have to play aainst them on every tournament ;-)). The first match, at 7h30 in the morning, is not exactly our strongest point. The result was a hard match which ended in our favor (3-2), again, we controlled the ball at the end of the game, we seem to be getting better at doing just that.

Having won that game, we qualified for the semi-finals, against Keistad B. They have some failry good shooters but lack the tactics to break our line defense. The result of 4 - 2 (in our favor) was maintained throughout the second half, where Keistad was forced to play 5 out on us. We were, again, able to hold on the ball...

The result: GEKKO in the finals of division 2 !!!
Never happened before ...

We watched the other semi-final to get to know our future opponent, Avon won against the Sicillian men, so an English team was soon to be our opponent.
Avon started the match with alot of pressure on our defense, obviously with the danger on getting scored against on fast breaks, we were able to do that once, 1 - 0 and pressure rising ...
A shot from the second line with a block setup on our defense resulted in 1 - 1 on the scoreboard. Pressure was maintained throughout the first half (on both sides) and the whistle was blown at 2 - 2 after 1 time.
No change in tactics was done for the second half aside for the increased activity when defending. Incoming attackers were hit much faster and that resulted in 2 nice goals for GEKKO when they lost the ball under pressure ...
With only 5 or 6 minutes to go, Avon went 5 out on us and met our solid ball keeping skills. We even scored once with a very long assist and clean goal ...
5 - 2 was the fantastic score of a nice game in second division ...

Again ... Veni, Vidi, Vici ...
For the first time ever, GEKKO played and won a final in second division internationaly.

Just for reference, the team at hand was Sebastiaan, Johan, Bart, Wouter, Pieter , Tim and myself ...