We were delighted to take part in the Business Fives charity football tournament in Edinburgh on Friday 17th March. The event kicked off with 28 teams in this highly competitive fundraiser with £4,460 raised for a range of local charities. This total helped push Business Fives past a massive half a million pound fundraising milestone since starting out. What an achievement!
Our team comprised of Richard Gardiner, Sam Houston, Lewis Hunter (back), Euan Beesley, Steven Sim (back), Alan Wall and Lee Duncanson.
Below is a round-up of the day from organiser Associate Steven Sim –
The games started at 2:30 and we were thrown into the deep end playing in the first game slot of the afternoon.
After a shaky start and losing the first goal we managed to rally and come out 3-1 victors. Another comfortable win followed with a number of the team members starting to dream of champions league. We were very quickly brought down to earth though with a 6-2 defeat in our last group game with a bit of complacency maybe creeping in. Despite that defeat we managed to hang onto 1st place in our group and we progressed to the champs league last 16 as top seeds.
Our last 16 games promised a lot, we found ourselves in a 4-2 lead with about 3 minutes to go, however we managed to contrive to throw that lead away and lose 5-4 in the last minute. Some shaky defending from the team captain for the day mainly to blame…
This forced us down into the consolation competition, the Europa conference league. We managed to rattle off a couple of relatively comfortable victories before another hard fought one goal win in the semi-final. Unfortunately, tired legs and the better team got the better of us in the final but a 5:3 win record for the day was nothing to be ashamed of.
Notable mentions go to Sam who would have comfortably have been top scorer for the day, Richard ‘the cat’ Gardiner who lived up to his name and covered up some ropey defending and Alan Wall who drew many admiring glances for the Edgar Davids specs he was wearing. Everybody contributed to a successful day though and it was a shame Lee injured his knee in the early games and couldn’t take part in the knockout stages.
The day finished with some pizza and drinks with the other teams and a question and answer with John Hartson which was well received.