Tuesday, 2 December 2008

homeless world cup - day two

scotland needed to win both their games against mexico and zimabwe to stay in contention, which they did by 9-5 and 8-5 with michael brennan and alec young scoring most of the goals between them. england lost a great game to poland 5-3 but recovered to beat ethiopia 11-4. holland started with a 9-2 win over canada, who had a little help from scotland's no. 2 goalie. brazil, the kings of street soccer, turned on the style beating argentina 15-3.

unbeaten teams after day two: afghanistan, ireland, kenya, lithunia, nigeria, poland, portugal, russia

Monday, 1 December 2008

homeless world cup - day one

the 2008 homeless world cup is happening in melbourne from 1 - 7 december. it's an international street soccer tournament organised by the big issue and has teams from 50 countries.

we helped out as marshals for the opening parade. scotland won last year's tournament in copenhagen so took their place behind the aussies - the hosts - in the parade along to the main stadium at federation square. behind them came afghanistan, argentina, austria, belgium, brazil, cambodia...all the way to zimbabwe. it was pretty incredible to see the players from the different countries all getting on and having a laugh together.

the scotland boys - most of them come from glasgow or nearby - made sure everyone else knew who they were by getting their faces in as many photos as possible. seen here introducing themselves to the brazilians...

we got free t-shirts for our troubles
unlike 'the other' football world cup there are no real boundaries between the teams and the fans. as a result the players found themselves the unexpected victims of some pretty indiscriminate autograph hunting, mostly from the hordes of aussie school girls present for the opening ceremony. even the finns got in on the act...

...and mirella had a friendly word with a couple of the dutch players. funnily enough, they just wanted to know where to find a party.
briefly, the rules of the game are as follows: four players on team (including one goalie), 7 minutes each way, one player has to remain in the opposition half at all times, penalties are dribbled from the halfway line, all games have a winner so drawn games go to sudden-death penalties.


the 'street socceroos' kicked things off by losing 3-0 to austria. then scotland had their first game against afghanistan. michael brannan scored scotland's first goal of the world cup and went on to score a hatrick, but the game ended 5-5 and scotland missed their one and only penalty. a little disappointing...

the other home nations fared better in their opening games. first, ireland beat the usa 11-2, with jimmy bell (no. 6) staring, then england beat sweden 14-1 with some pretty slick football. last year's runners up, poland, beat hungary 11-1 and nigeria beat italy on penalties after drawing 5-5.