Week 3 – It’s raining day !

More coaching

After the joy scenes of a first victory in friendly for GDM, I returned to the peaceful routine of the Mozambican life. As Monday is free of coaching duty, I helped with my colleagues Armando and James to pack and unpack club’s ice creams. This is one the GDM’s business in motion and our job was to balance each pack to make it even in terms of Flavours.

On Tuesday, we’re back in business with the U17’s and the first team. The headcoach, Pingy, gives us the topic and we plan the next day session around it. It’s such a good environment to work in, an absolute pleasure. Our sessions are always going well and the players are enjoying them, which is the most important. With the season approaching for both U17’s and first teams, we have to chose each starting 11. For the U17’s, the ones who turns up every day in training will be starting to encourage the others to come more often and raise the attendance. For the first team, the only problem is that we have too many good offensive players, which is a good problem to have. The question is more about putting the most suitable players for the team in each position.

Run Forest, Run !

For the first time since we arrived, we experienced rain. Unbelievable! On Monday night, we had the chance to watch a tremendous storm. I have never seen such violence into the sky. Lightnings and rain were absolutely destroying the usual peaceful blue sky of Manica for about an hour.

On Wednesday, on my way back from a community session located right under the Vumba Mountain, I had a bad feeling about the black clouds above my head. Walking nearby the pitch we coach, I crossed Armando and several first team players. At first, we were just walking and talking. But soon, everyone started to run to find a place to hide. In 15 seconds under this heavy rain, it was too late. So we decided to run five more minutes to come home.

A nice weekend

On Saturday, the plan was to climb the Vumba Mountain. And we did it, I mean a part of it. We couldn’t reach the top… But I will talk about this amazing journey in a future complete post.

On Sunday, new friendly match for GDM. The opponent team is currently playing in the 2nd division of Mozambique, which is one above GDM. After a good start, GDM managed to score the first goal. A beautiful goal built from our own half of the pitch. This is the kind of goal we are working on since we arrived. Still, the opponent team equalized right before half-time. Then, we took off the first team to give some time on the pitch for the substitutes. We finally lost the game 1-2 after conceding a late winner goal.

This week was a bad one for Arsenal … After losing stupidly against Barcelona 0-2 at the Emirates, the Gunners managed to repeat that performance against Manchester United at Old Trafford. A poor performance which relegates Arsenal 5 points down Leicester and 3 points down Tottenham… How is that even possible …

#Mozambique