Most afternoons after their five o’clock tea, you can find the secondary boys out at the field playing football. A bunch of the guys regularly go out to play pick-up at the primary school adjacent to Tumaini. They have even competed in tournaments against local teams around Nyeri whenever they can find a sponsor to organize a tournament. There was a tournament organized for December that fell through because their sponsor lost his local election (and thus lost his interest in supporting the local football tournament). So, with the help of a few of the boys, I decided to organize and sponsor a tournament for them.
So within the span of a couple of weeks, we put together and organized Tumaini’s 2008 Football Cup, which was held this past weekend. I had the dual responsibility of sponsor/organizer and center mid for the Tumaini Classics. Despite a last minute field change, a small stint of rain, and a few typical tournament tiffs between competing teams, the whole thing turned out to be a success and lots of fun for the boys.
The tournament included six local teams competing in one round of group play with two teams from each group qualifying for semi-final playoff matches. The first match was scheduled for 9am on Saturday morning but due to typical Kenyan unpunctuality, we started just after 10. Eight games later and just before sunset, we wrapped up the first day of the tournament and left the championship and consolation games for the following day to be played in the local stadium.
Our Tumaini squad had an impressive showing. We battled it out in the competitive group matches against teams, Trench and Gatitu, and came out as the Group A champions by goal differential. However, we lost a hard fought semi-final to land us in the consolation match. The final was comprised of Micha and St. Mary’s and despite pre-game conflict over complaints of “corruption” on the part of Micha (they were accused of bringing in ringers for the championship match), the last game of the tournament went smoothly and was decided on an intense penalty kick shootout. Micha FC came out on top as the tournament champs and received their prize money of ksh.1000 and a new Nike ball (compliments of Stanford soccer ☺).
Another highlight of the weekend was the timely arrival of the donated jerseys for Tumaini delivered by Jonathan just before kick-off of our first match. Through the organizational efforts of Dianna Heeb, MVLA soccer club and St. Simon’s sent a duffle bag full of jerseys, goalie gloves, and warm-ups with Jonathan on his return flight back to Kenya. This surprise delivery resulted in many smiles and made for a very “smart” looking Tumaini squad.
