Football Nationals U19

On Friday the 20th of March the U-19 boys football team traveled down to Lusaka to play in the ISAZ finals. It was a competition that consisted of the four best teams from Copperbelt (including Amano) competing against the four best teams from Lusaka. They split us up into two groups, and in our group we had Lake Road, Chengelo and American International School of Lusaka (AISL). The top two from each group would go on to the semi-finals to then compete for the trophy.
Our first game was against Lake Road, who we hadn't played in a long time and so didn't know what to expect, but that didn't effect our performance and we ended up winning that game 5-1, with James getting a hat-rick as well as Seth and Edwin getting a goal each. This was all due to the hard work we put in as well as the fact that we played really well as a team. Our next game was against Chengelo (who we had previously beaten 3-0 in qualifying), we knew this wasn't going to be an easy game as they changed their formation completely and where really tight on our top two as well as playing with a sweeper. We managed to score in that game but unfortunately it was disallowed because of a handball. We drew that game 0-0, which meant in order to come in the top two we simply couldn't lose our last game against AISL. We went into that game considerably confident but we gave away an early goal. This more or less threw our structure out of the window as we scrambled to try and get a goal that never came. So overall we came third in our group which meant we weren't able to qualify for the semi-finals but, all in all, I think it was an amazing experience for most of us, we played our hardest and that’s the most important thing even though it wasn't enough.

James was the Man of the Match for me seeing he scored a hat trick.

By Edwin Dingwall