A Helpless Player in a Hopeless Football Team

I am no sports fan. Neither do I play any games. Ohh that is not exactly accurate. I did play football once in a while in my younger days but that was limited to afternoon games with friends or occasional unavoidable appearances such as in an inter-subsidiary tournament in my Company. Most of the times, the subsidiary companies that I work in have bookworms or nerds as its staff and in order to assemble a complete team they have not much choice but to include me too.

Once, I had just joined a subsidiary of a big conglomerate that had also just been established to start a new project. Before long the Conglomerate organises a soccer (pardon me for the change of terminology) tournament. After adding two expatriate consultants - one from Chicago the other from Jakarta - who have no choice but to agree to join the team, we were short of one player. And I had to join the newly assembled team.

Our team has the most number of 'intellectuals and intelligent' players - programmers, legal executive, PhD-holders and not to mention mathematicians. We had a few organising meetings on how to take part in the tournament. With a small sum of money allocated by the Finance Department of our fledgling company, we bought a soccer ball and just enough jerseys for our players. We had three practices in the evenings before the tournament day. On the competition day, while waiting for our team to be called in we did some practices on the side. Not long after, a member of our team accidentally kicked the ball a bit too had and in the wrong direction. We watched with mouths agape as it went flying high onto the street outside the venue. A lady staff went to look for it but she came back empty-handed.

When our team entered the field for our first match, we get the loudest roar from the spectators. I guess it (the roar) was not for our prowess on the field but the manner our team play which was in total contrast from that of other teams'. The ball seemed reluctant to move into our opponents' side of the field. Our goalkeeper was extremely busy trying to catch or keep the balls from getting into our net. More than half of our team members - yours truly included - end up running after the elusive ball instead of getting a chance of kicking it, since we had to take off our glasses lest they get broken during the play.

The results was a forgone conclusion! Our goalposts were too wide for our goalkeeper to control and the balls seemed to keep coming into the direction of our net. We played only one match and lost. To add insult to injury, we lost the ball before we lost the match. I was just a helpless player in our company's hopeless football team! One-sided or not, my kaki bangku status remains unchanged since then, quite an impresive record in term of consistency!