Week 4 - Mozambique

It has been a tough week for us here in Mozambique.

Towards the end of last weekend, I started to become very ill. A stomach bug had developed and it only got worse over the next couple of days. I really struggled to eat or quite frankly do anything. With big worries of Malaria going through my head, Pingy took me to the hospital.

The hospital was exactly how I would have expected a hospital to be in a poor African town such as this. It was extremely crowded, queues went down the stairs and onto the street and echoes of screaming could be heard down the hall. It’s definitely something I will never forget. The test showed that I didn’t have malaria (I will come back to this) and I was given some tablets to take.

After a day or so, I felt much better and by Thursday I was just about able to do some coaching again. This quick recovery proved that I definitely hadn’t had malaria.

Unfortunately it wasn’t the same story for Armando and one of the other visitors here Kinvara. Who although tested negative for malaria, were later told by the club that the tests are not reliable if anti malarial tablets are already being taken and that their symptoms showed that they most likely did have malaria. Writing this on the following Monday, they are still very ill but are on the mend. Even our resilient Frenchman Albin has been ill, the only one of us thats remained fine has been one of the other visitors Jake. Lucky sod.

I’m glad that I could return and not miss a whole week of coaching.

On Thursday I went to one of the community sessions. To my surprise, the first team player who coaches at this venue hadn’t shown up, which also meant there was no equipment. One of the boys ran to get a ball. Using my bag as a cone I did a ball skills exercise (working on stepovers, body feints, flip flap, scoop turns etc) and then using rocks for goals we finished with a match. This shows that you dont need much to have a fun session!!!

My ability to think on my feet was further tested on Saturday. Me and Albin arrived at FUTECO (the clubs pitches), and were soon told we would be organising the fixtures and result tables of a football tournament for about 200 kids that were ready waiting and that it needed to start ASAP. With no other information about how they wanted it to be run, we tried to organise them into 3 tournaments. We were then later told the boys were in teams they had to play in. After a stressful few minutes of organisation, (you can probably tell this in my expression below) we managed to work out a fixture list and got the tournament going. Once it was up and running, it went smoothly and was a big success. The coaches reactions to goals was priceless!!!

You are probably thinking why couldnt they have given us more notice so we could have planned it all before the event. That’s just how it is here. They have this lovely laid back attitude, which although is brilliant to be around, I do believe is the reason for the lack of preparation. I feel as though we will only be able to encourage more preparation to a point.

Another example of this was on Sunday. GDMs match was meant to kick off at 1. We arrived at 1.30. Nope there was no traffic or anything. This meant the players had no time to warm up and the game had to be cut short by 10 mins. Perhaps if we had better preparation we would have had a stronger start and not gone 1-0 down. In the second half we dominated and a penalty save prevented us from equalising. I have to mention the midfield masterclass from Chabi who had a faultless game (pictured below).

Spirits remain high as we approach the start of the season, come on GDM!!!

#Mozambique