It was a bright and cool Saturday morning as I took a stroll with my family along East Coast Parkway. The rain had stopped by 8am and the weather forecast was all clear for the afternoon. I was looking forward to Soccer Fellowship after a 2-week break from the field. It was thus a rude shock when I received a text message from John to inform me that Sports Council had again cancelled our field booking, again due to the pitch being waterlogged from the early morning showers. I immediately called the field manager, Shakirin, to pursue the matter and pressed for his reasons for doing this repeatedly. His main points:
1. He, and not us, has been trained to inspect the field and deem it playable or not.
2. The drainage system in Greenview Secondary is particularly poor (compared to other schools), so we cannot compare and say that we were allowed to play on other fields before, even when it rained. (he even advised us not to book Greenview Sec in the future. I replied by asking why they still open the field for booking when they should be upgrading the drainage system).
3. If the field is damaged, the Sports Council would be fined by the school, and he could not let this happen.
Nonetheless, the decision was made to carry on with Soccer Fellowship at Pasir Ris Primary, just down the road. I still turned up at Greenview Sec to meet whoever showed up there and also take the photo below of the field, to show that again, apart from the little pool of water just at the near goal line, the field looks absolutely dry and playable.
Greenview Secondary Field - playable or not?
18 of us turned up for Soccer Fellowship at Pasir Ris Primary and Maurice led us in devotion before we took to the field. The focus of the sharing was on making come backs, not just on the playing field, but also off it. He ended by encouraging us to make come backs, not just as a team in Soccer, but in our personal lives as well.
Maurice sharing devotion
Andrew (back from UK) and Wei En listening to the devotion
Ronnie & Darius kitting up
The benefit of playing at the 'Free to Play' field at Pasir Ris Primary was that we could pit our skills against others, and also use 2 pitches (9-a-side and 5-a-side) at the same time! We also took turns playing on both pitches and it was generally easy going and rotating our team against the other teams present. The action on the 9-a-side pitch was definitely more fast and furious, with teams wanting to prove their superiority based on 'First to 2 goals wins'. We won a couple of times and also lost once. In one of the last games, we trailed 1-0 and looked to be on the way off the pitch until late goals from Yi Jun and Rusydi kept us on. What a comeback!
The very nice Pasir Ris Primary artificial turf
9-a-side action
Ronnie taking his skills to the 5-a-side pitch
Darius taking a break in goal
At about 530pm, players started to trickle off, leaving only the 'hardcore' left to continue to their run-out. Overall, it was another good session and certainly Pasir Ris Primary provides a good place to have Soccer Fellowship whenever our field booking is cancelled.
