First of all, I barely played for 5 mins before I started to feel sharp pains in my ankle again, so I called for a sub. It was the most horrible thing to sit there in full gear and not being able to play, but I tried to compensate by cheering my voice hoarse for the team.
Secondly, WE NEED A COACH. Sze Luan, Jovy, Zoe and I agreed in the car (on the way home) that we hadn't made any progress in terms of improving our skills and tactics, etc.; if anything, with Anas gone for good and Hajar (who usually takes charge) being back home for the holidays, we'd only been running around like headless chickens and regurgitating drills without being given any input or learning anything new. I'm really really glad, though, that Shaymi has been helping out however and whenever he can, and Shiv has been doing a good job rounding the girls up for light kickarounds and such.
I got a little emo watching the other teams with their coaches, soaking up instructions. The Indonesian girls had Kreshna (they've even got a manager and assistant manager wtf), and the Singaporean girls had Eddie. The most painful thing was the fact that Eddie was my boyfriend, and he was coaching the team who scored against us. Eddie tried to be fair by coming over to talk to us after we'd lost. He meant well but I felt it was the wrong thing for him to do to do at the wrong time, because everyone was still simmering from the defeat, and I could feel Daph trying to surpress her anger while Eddie went on about what he thought we ought to improve on. I felt tears coming, and for the first time ever, I walked away from him.
I wasn't upset because we had lost, not at all. I thought it was a fair win and that Farah scored a good goal. I was jealous and angry because the other teams have got someone totally committed to helping them be their best for this competition, and we hadn't. We've clung on to what we've gotten from the NCG, and I'm really grateful we've at least had that exposure which the other teams don't.
I miss Anas terribly. I miss his encouragement and his calmness, and I miss his exhausting but fun training sessions. I miss his positive attitude towards everything no matter how badly we sucked, and I miss him always using Jerry to demonstrate his drills just because he could budge her around a bit more. I miss having him shouting at us from the side-lines, telling us what to do and coordinating who needs to be where, and who needs to be substituted. I miss him giving us a pat on the back and telling us we've done a great job. I miss how easily he could make anyone feel confident enough to conquer the world. Everyone felt lost without him yesterday; we didn't know what we were doing wrong, and we didn't know what we needed to do. In the end, during the finals, the girls got so desperate that they just grabbed some random guy in a jersey walking past, and appointed him to watch and supervise and yell at us... and I think it was not because we needed him to tell us what to do, but because we needed the comfort of knowing that there was someone there looking out for us.
Sigh. Anas can you pls clone yourself and come back?
