We Should Have Won! – LSI/IH Portsmouth Plays Football

Alert: Football language used in the following:
LSI/IH Portsmouth’s team played a blinder!
We spoke to their manager John Hicks for the low down of the match.

John is in the middle with a red top
“The current group of players haven’t really been training
long, they play football on Mondays and Wednesdays, but Friday was the first
time they’d all played on the same team together. They were thrown together and
coped really well. The team was made up of loads of different nationalities. Normally
with the school we train twice a week and then the nearer we get to the Summer
the more popular it gets, and yeah some of the students play down on the common (Southsea Common) as well.
So on Friday we played in The Portsmouth University
tournament, which involved 15 games with teams from the university, a bit like
a mini World Cup. They had some first team players who were really good and
then some others 😉

Was it fair? Well we were robbed a little bit, to be honest
we had a very very difficult group, some of the teams in our group were really
strong, physically and in terms of ability. We won the group then the quarter and semi finals.  We did extremely
well to get to the final but I think by then they were quite drained and tired.
They were also tired from the physical nature of English football, they got
kicked in the air a little bit, and were a little bruised and battered.  If we had played the team from the final at
the start we would have killed them!  

In
total they played 6 or 7 games, each one lasts about 20 minutes to half an
hour, and yes they were exhausted by the end of it.  We were unlucky not to win it, we were
definitely the best footballing side, but the physical nature of English
football came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of them, they were quite shocked
that the ref wasn’t giving them a bit more protection, but welcome to English
football 😉

This is how everyone felt!

What’s next for us? Well there’s a language schools’ competition, where all of the local language schools will get together and have a tournament – and we will win that one!”