15.1.2008

Since I got here, I have wanted to go somewhere to play football. In campus there is a notice board for every sport and from there I got the number of the coach of PolyU soccer team. I tried to call him on monday but he didn't answer. On tuesday I talked about football with Martin, a swedish student, and find out that he had contacted that coach and was going to the trainings today. So I decided to join him with Daniel from UK. We went to the office of the coach at 7pm. And he gave us a lift to the stadium as it was further away from the campus. In campus we have a football field but it's not a regular size grass field. We were not quite confident about the whole training thing because of our skills and our overal physical condition. Once the coach introduced us the physio therapist of the team we realized they were training quite seriously:)

The Joint Sports Centre stadium was pretty nice. The grass was not in very good condition though, but it was good enough. It felt pretty weird standing there on the grass in the middle of "the winter", watching high buildings rise on the sides of the stadium and hearing just chinese language around you:) Once the training started, the coach introduced us to the team as new team mates and we got a round of applause from the guys. Again... weird feeling:) But like I was saying to Daniel when trying to convince him to come there: it was going to be one of those once in a lifetime moments, you know, being in a chinese football team. And I sure will reminisce this day among others when I'm older.

The training was crazy! We ran 6 laps for a warm-up. Too much for three guys out of shape:) And after that we did some coordination training. After that the coach was explaining something in chinese for the whole team. They had semifinal matches coming up so they were taking everything seriously. We started to play against the best players. We exchange students were of course in the training team just trying to defend as the better guys were attacking. The whole training was about 2.5 hours long, so we were half dead once it was over! I think I've never trained that hard. My legs were killing me. But at the same time I was feeling like a winner:)

The atmosphere on the field was great. The players were making these cheers while we were training. Like in coordination training we were all suppose to repeat everything what the lead guy said. And during the game training someone always yelled "POLY!" and the rest of the team answered "U!". I wish I had had someone with my video camera there. I just had time to took this one photo which is not so good. Martin is the one with the yellow shirt and Daniel is the other white guy in the back ready to faint:)



After the training some team mates showed us the way to the MTR and we returned to the Student Halls. We arrived there at 11pm so almost every restaurant had closed and we were forced to go to McDonald's. We ate like horses in there:)