Well the day the boys were finally waiting for, day one of the tournament. For those who aren't aware, there are a 104 teams in this tournament, with 103 being from Iceland and then there is our team. Three clubs in this town of 4,000 alone. Needless to say there are a lot of 10 year old boys running around "supervised" by their coaches and chaperones - a bit of chaos.
We met up with the boys for breakfast at 7:30. They seemed well rested and ready to play. We had played a couple of friendlies in Reykjavik on Monday to try to get the boys accustomed to the rules in this tournament (no offsides, 15 minutes halves and goal kicks are ball in hand) and although we dominated those games we lost them both. This is a new day and these games count.
The first game started out with a bang against Vikingur. Charlie scored almost immediately and then again. Alex scored another to make the game 3-0. The boys were playing great. Connecting passes, staying back on defense. It was a great game to watch. Second half, Alex scored another goal followed by Beau and then Simon got in two goals. All and all a great game. Final score 7-0.
Second game was at 10:20 against Breidablik. This game was a bit more challenging. They scored first although it was very late in the first half. We had quite a few opportunities to score but it just wasn't happening. The first half ended 0-1. The second half started out about the same with neither team able to score. Alex finally put one away to tie up the game 1-1. Charlie soon followed with his second goal and then Breidablik tied it up. Time was quickly running out on the second half when Beau managed to sneak in a goal to put us up 4-3 - final score.
Our third game was after lunch (fish balls) and this was against Throttur, who we had played in a friendly match early in the week. The boys were ready for revenge. They did have a couple of tall kids in the back field. Throttur scored first and had the only goal of the first half. Our defense was working extremely hard. Simon was the goalie first half and was moved to the outside midfield for the second half. We're not sure if he was upset that they scored on him, but whatever was going on with him was great because he came out the second half and marched down the field to score and tie up the game. He scored another shortly after to go up by one. The last couple minutes of this game seemed to go by extremely slow and we were all greatly relieved when the final whistle blew. Final score 2-1.
The boys all went and had an ice cream to celebrate a victorious day while the parents found various things to keep themselves occupied until dinner. We had an early dinner (spaghetti) so we could book down to the harbor for our boat tour. It was short but informative. 10,000 species of birds breed on this very small island (including 30% of the world Puffin population).
After the tour a quick break before the opening ceremonies. These ceremonies were a great thing for the boys, parading down the streets with 103 other teams into the stadium where we saw fireworks, air show and a professional soccer player do some amazing dribbling. This is where the boys received their first loss of the day. At the end of the ceremonies all the teams had to do a relay race where each player on the team had to run down the length of the soccer field, pull a bag of chips out of a garbage bag tied to the fence, run back and hand the baton off to the next player. Beau got us an early lead, but he had an issue getting the chips out of the bag. This continued to be a problem for us and clearly the coach should have spent more time on working with the boys on how to get small bags of chips out of a trash bag tied to the fence. Well, guess you can't win them all.
post by Suzy
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