The Road to 40 Day 22/365: First game experience

by | Jun 1, 2025 | Strawberry-Filled Donuts

It’s Vino’s first match day!

After weeks of training, he got his first taste of an actual game today, so we headed out to the stadium to watch him play.

He’s playing in the under-8 team, so they have two six-minute halves with about three pitches playing at the same time.

A total of five players are on the court, including the goalkeeper. On this day, not a lot of kids turned up, so Vino got to play a lot as the keeper.

He said he was nervous, but you could feel his excitement the whole way through even if he was trying to hide it.

My guy was doing well early on, blocking a lot of shots that came his way.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t stop a few more that came his way. He came off as a keeper having saved maybe eight shots, but gave up three.

Because they didn’t have a lot of players, he was still able to get back on the pitch in a different capacity.

By the end of the game, they lost 6-1.

Vino took the loss better than I expected, and he had so much fun that he said he wanted to do three games the next day even if we had to be at the venue by 7:15AM.

After we got home, Che wanted to rest. I wanted to do something and I knew that the guys were able to gather enough players to for an afternoon basketball session.

I hurried to catch the games, but as luck would have it, rain poured and the games had to stop by the time I got there.

Instead, it was straight to the hawker center for a quick beer session.

As much as I would like to cut off beer from my diet, it’s really a quick, cheap, and easy drink for sessions like these.

I learned a couple of OG guys are going to leave SG for good soon, which might make organizing our neighborhood leagues tricky moving forward. We also talked about basketball – something Che wouldn’t be naturally excited about.

I’ve been following the NBA playoffs and I’ve been sending DM’s to a couple of buddies whenever there’s a game just to have someone to talk to about it. So this post-game session is quite refreshing in that I actually have someone to talk to in the same space.

Hurried back home to catch my 9PM meeting, because I was scheduled to interview a fighter by then.

Alcohol helped me speak English confidently, and the meeting went as good as it could, especially with a couple of handlers helping dissect his thoughts in English.

Both Vino and Che were sleeping by the time I got to the room, which is just right, as we need to wake up early next day for Vino’s first multi-game match.

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