On a day where something resembling “football” was played, YFC deservedly won 1-0 against an inept Heights FC side. From the get go YFC controlled the midfield and were consistently winning and keeping possession. Most of the 1st half was played in Heights’ half, with some slick passing and great movement throughout the YFC side. The defense was tremendous the entire game and a new fangled 3-2-3-2 formation bore some sweet fruit. With Jackson Castellanos and Stuart Trann playing just in front of a back 3 of Minoru Echizenya, Dan Rankin and Arkadius Was there was hardly a whiff at goal for Heights in the first half.
The goal came from a ball won by Man of the Match, Jackson Castellanos who then worked it across to eventually end up on the boot of Antonio Rabelo. Antonio then crossed beautifully to Steffen Mennekes at the far post who headed powerfully past the helpless Heights keeper. The goal seemed to throw Heights into a frenzy of name calling and screaming at their own players. This was just the beginning.
Heights continued to be ineffective in all areas of the park, with exception of a few central players who did quite well in the midfield and defense. Their main problem was getting so upset at just about everything. Their anger was directed at just about anything you could imagine, screaming at the ref, their players, YFC players… you name it, they got mad at it. A challenge from Martin Sosa brought their frenzy to a breaking point, the player involved in the challenge rose to lash out at Martin, throwing him to the ground. Inexplicably, the ref yellow carded them both when clearly the retaliation deserved something stronger.
Dirty play continued throughout the first half, with many hard body checks flying around and dangerous lunging tackles all over the pitch. A freekick to the left of the Heights goal resulted in a crowd around the ref, which eventually led to Nima Farahmand taking a sweet freekick that tipped off the keeper’s hand into the top corner. As YFC celebrated this beautiful goal, the players noticed the ref had blown for a foul of some kind. Somehow the freekick had been deemed indirect, and somehow the ref decided that no contact had been made by the Heights keeper and disallowed the legit goal. Definitely a bit of a head scratcher.
On to the second half, where perhaps 5-10 minutes in a Heights player ran by Stuart Trann claiming that he was going to punch the YFC keeper in the face for not picking up the ball soon enough. Stuart encouraged the player to give it a try and see what happens and he received a punch in the face himself. The referee had his back to the incident, and shortly after Stuart was red carded for a strong challenge on the Heights player who had struck his face. YFC was now down to 10 men for approximately 40 odd minutes.
YFC continued to play very well and created numerous scoring chances even with 10 men. Arnim Wiek had a great headed chance from close range go over the bar and Pierce Joneson was through on goal only to be body checked off the ball by a reckless Heights defender. The ref allowed this sort of physical play much to the chagrin of YFC who felt they deserved many a foul. One such tackle on Nima Farahmand was very cynical and could have caused serious injury, but luckily Nima escaped to play on.
The last 10 minutes of the match saw YFC tire a bit and they were hanging on for the 1-0 win with the possession going to Heights to finish the match. They were pressing hard and won a number of freekicks and corners that were well dealt with by Sherman Lai and the YFC defense.
YFC won this hard fought match by out playing their opponents in every aspect of the game. Unfortunately the match was marred by shameful behaviour from YFC’s opponents, one player repeatedly shouted racist remarks at our Japanese attacker, Kenji Okuma. Additionally the coach of the team took the time to run all the way around the pitch to confront Stuart Trann, swearing and cursing and eventually telling him that his team was going to jump him after the game. Not exactly the sort of thing you want to happen when you want to have fun and play football.