Week 4 - Malaria & Co

Rough week

Like suggested in the title of this post, this week was more complicated than expected to handle for the group. James was the first to get sick. Then Kinvara, another foreign visitor of GDM, and Armando followed. On my side, I only had a cold, a couple of bad headaches and some intestinal troubles through the week but nothing as bad as them. Only Jake, who came here with Kinvara, managed to get through all of this without any personal damage.

Because of all of this health issues, the coaching side suffered from it. Armando missed all of them, James came back for the last training and I wasn’t present on Wednesday. As you can see, our usual coaching routine has been revised a little. However, on Friday James and I coached together a session that I specially prepared for the team around attacking combinations play from the center backs. The main aim of that session was CREATIVITY. Trust you partners, play the way you can, be creative and use your instinct to surprise your opponent. This speech was basically what I said to them before we begin the session. I was afraid of that creativity part but coaching such smart players is a relief. They understood right away my idea and the session went very well.

200 kids tournament

As everyone feeling better, the end of the week has been busy for James and I. On Saturday, we had to organize a kids tournament without no idea what to do or how it was suppose to work. Let’s put this under context. On our community sessions, we always coach with a first team player all age groups of kids mixed up. So, when we arrived at Futeco to set-up the tournament, our first thought was to separate the kids by ages and then create teams of equal numbers to make it right for everyone. The only problem was that it doesn’t work like this here. All the kids are supposed to play for their usual first team coach. But of course, no one told us that so we were moving forward blind. Eventually, Pingy, the headcoach, explained to us the way it was to suppose to be organized and we then managed to adjust ourselves really quickly. This event was really stressful as we had around two hundreds kids waiting for us to play. Our adaptation skills were absolutely put under pressure, which is a good thing.

Albin Mouton, He gets angry…

Later on Saturday, we played the usual 5-a-side football match at Futeco. And this time was really intense. James and I almost lost it against some of the opposite team players as they were absolutely not playing fair-play. These guys are masters of nasty challenges. I’m famously known in the Programme for getting angry at people when it comes to football and especially nasty challenges, I’ve always been like this. What’s the point of putting someone under a real danger of injury when you don’t need to do it to recover properly the ball. Never understood how stupid some people are when it comes to tackles. So once again, I got angry at those guys because I had to. I’m afraid that next time would be as bad as this one…

GDM friendly match

On Sunday, we went to Chimioi, Manica State Capital, for a new friendly against a 2nd division team, which is one division above GDM. Thanks to the Mozambican time, we ended up arriving late to the match. No warm-up, no stretching, no team talk, players were thrown into the game right away. James and I were a bit concerned about it and after ten minutes, our right winger Santos injured himself.. With already one of our best player missing and our left back, the captain, out because of Malaria, the situation was getting worse and worse. We finally lost the game 1-0 and missed a penalty but the second half was satisfying. We played more like in training. I guess the time and the repetition of games will fix this problem.

Arsenal, throwing away opportunities

Once again, bad week for Arsenal. After Manchester United last week, the Gunners lost at home 1-2 against Swansea. A poor performance meaning that Arsenal only have a small, small, small chance of winning the title. After drawing Tottenham 2-2 at White Hart Lane, Arsenal is now 3 points below the Spurs and 8 behind Leicester City. The Foxes are on their way to the Premier League title, which would be absolutely beautiful for them.

#Mozambique