Language School League In our short history as a football team, SGI United has never won a game. Earlier this year, an invitation had been made by Avalon FC for a first-ever game in what would be the start of an Inter-School league. Fixtures would be arranged independently between available schools, with results added to the website www.leaguewebsite.co.uk/efllondon. The First Game
In that inaugural game, we narrowly lost by a last-minute goal, and from then on expectations were high that we could at least compete with other teams. But SGI has faced a series of quite unique problems. Firstly, we have ever-changing team: students leave to go home very regularly and finding students willing and able to participate can be a challenge. Additionally, having no practice in an unstable team is never a recipe for success. So it’s no surprise that defeats by other schools (including a record 14-0 loss) quickly followed. The Last Match However, we finally got our chance for revenge against Avalon FC last Thursday. It all started so well. We quickly took the lead with a slick four-man move, starting from defence. However, this turned out to be one of our few attacks and things went rapidly downhill from then on. Individual mistakes allowed Avalon to take a 4-1 lead at half-time but with our engine and playmaker, SGI teacher Kieran, not making it out for the 2nd half, we feared the worst. This was realised with a glut of goals by Avalon, therefore making our aim to keep the score line in single figures. Unfortunately, we just missed out on that with the final score being 10 -1. We can at least hold our heads high for scoring a goal and being briefly in the lead!
Even with this result, as well as our other defeats, SGI United showed great team-spirit, humour and sportsmanship, with well-attended support in all our games. Now the summer is drawing to a close, who knows when our next game will be. So we may have been annihilated. And we may still be waiting for our first win. But we will always be United.
