With the World Cup looming on the horizon, an intrepid team of footballers solemnly packed their kits, arrived at the airport and flew off to make history, with thoughts in their minds of past tournaments, the expectation back home and the prize awaiting them.
We are of course talking about the annual Cloud Clash tournament, hosted by salesforce.com and set in the beautiful City of Dublin.
Now in it’s third year we have had representatives at each tournament, but this year our hopes were boosted by some young talent.
After spending the day in an outdoor team meeting, the team donned their pale blue strips and left in convey for the late afternoon start.
Our first game looked like it might be our toughest test of the event, but with our strongest team out we kicked off against the bookies favourites, the salesforce.com team.
Play began energetically, with some beautiful football from both sides. Our Goalkeeper Stephen ‘Shilton’ Whitehead made some stunning saves, before the breakthrough we deserved came.
Javed ‘Ronaldo’ Ahmed played a silky through ball to Petra who connected with the ball sweetly for our first goal – which translated as three goals because a girl scored it.
Our defence stayed strong throughout, with strong tackles flying in from Gary Smith and Mark Crosby, which kept the ball away from our goal and helped 2020 to a 3-0 victory at full-time.
Our second game saw the team enter the pitch riding a wave of confidence, with Whitehead in full control at the back, whilst James Batey and our very own French superstar Gatean Barbeu bossed around the midfield, allowing Javed to terrorise the oppositions defence.
Petra made way for Rachel who made life very difficult for the opposition keeper, by darting around the box and drawing defenders away with her.
Javed was the untouchable man of the match, scoring four goals and setting up our fifth. Whilst a late consolation goal was all our opponents could manage.
The hot sun and tiredness were beginning to effect our team and next up were the salesforce.com Managers whose winning reputation goes before them. Again Javed was the star player, whilst rolling substitutions helped the team keep the Managers at bay, with Francis Pindar making some crucial tackles and reinforcing the rapidly fading defence.
The highlight of this game was Whitehead making a run from his own area, skipping past several challenges before burying the ball in the back of the net.
A ‘girl-goal’ was our undoing though, and a weary team left the pitch as 4-2 losers.
Our final match was against the ‘salesforce.com UK & Ireland’ team. A victory here would see us crowned winners of our league and we would then play the winners of the other league in the Final, so in effect this was a semi-final.
Keeper Stephen Whitehead had picked up a nasty injury on his knee during the second match but self-certified himself ‘match-fit’ for the final two matches, despite the obvious pain.
Rachel had to withdraw through injury, so with a depleted squad and injured keeper we took to the pitch knowing that a win against this highly skilled salesforce.com team would see us through to the final.
Two early ‘girl-goals’ in quick succession from salesforce gave our team too much work to do and with this deficit and tired limbs, our valiant team members saw several more goals inch past them into the net.
Even our star players Gaetan and Javed were unable to break through the oncoming tide from salesforce and with hopes fading fast, the referee blew his whistle and ended our chances of lifting the trophy this year.
The 2020 team could hold their heads high with some beautiful football, great teamwork and most importantly, it was all for a great cause – The Homeless World Cup.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the salesforce.com organisers and other partners for such a fantastic time, and for playing the games in such good and fair spirit.
We hope any readers of this will support salesforce.com as they continue to raise money for the Homeless World Cup.
We will be returning to the tournament in 2011 and this time we hope we will go one step further and reach the final. Who knows, we might even be bringing the trophy home with us next year.
