Day 2- Football/ Markaz

Gambia High School and Gambia Markaz

The hard work of the previous day, along with the travelling and acclimatising merited a lie-in for recovery! Taking into consideration the group mainly consisted of young people, we didn’t want to over-burden them so we chose to relax on the beach and hotel. Some of the gym fanatics spent their afternoon pumping iron!

The group were eagerly awaiting the Super Sunday football match against GHSFC who were crown champions of Gambian Schools Youth League  earlier in the year which was due to kick off at 4:00pm.

Kits provided by the Gambian School's Football team

A line up of both teams merged together.

On arrival at the school we were taken-aback by the scale of the match. We were expecting a friendly kick-around but to our surprise we were greeted by hundreds of fans and were welcomed by the minister of sport for Gambia.

Our opposition were “kitted out” and looked the part, a spare set of kits were handed to us by the school, which we accepted. It wasn't a conventional football pitch that our UK lads were used to, the conditions were best described as similar to beach football. However, we had to adjust to the away pitch, knuckle down to avoid the possibility of an annihilation (you can find the match report at the bottom of this page).

A Quick team talk with the players before resuming the match.

The man of the match, Zakaria Sharif, scoring the pivotal goal in the match.

A group picture of players from both teams.

legendary boots given away to a very happy, young Gambian.

After the match many of us gave our football boots, tops, and even socks to some of the players. To us, it may not seem much, but each and every item that was given away was valued by them; it was written all over their faces. 

It was a great day, the young volunteers made friends with the opposition team and shared their Facebook, Twitter and e-mails details to keep in touch. We then left the school to visit the Markaz to pray our Isha Salah. After prayers, we sat down with some of the local brothers to whom we explained what we were doing and got to know one another. The Amir of the Masjid was very pleased to see us.

 Mosquito nets donated to the Markaz Masjid.

We made a Lillah donation and left the committee with 10 Mosquito nets for people that wanted to sleep over at night in the Masjid.

Although our second day was fairly relaxed, during the day a few of the volunteers who were responsible for finances stayed up until 4am updating our financial records. It was then that the stark reality of the lack of time we had hit home.


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Match Report

The first half was disastrous for our team; we couldn't string even 5 passes together. The sand, humidity, and climate made it very difficult for us to play our usual fluent passing game. We ended the first half 2-0 down and were staring down the end of the barrel!

After an inspirational half time team talk by Asif and some tactical reshuffling, we began the second much more positively. Within 10 minutes of resuming the game we clawed back one goal with a neat finish from Maaz. We had adapted to the playing conditions and settled into our Barcelona-esque tica-taca passing game!

10 minutes after the first goal our G2G team were awarded a free kick. The cross was pinged into the path of Haroon who was brought down by the keeper, penalty! Ismail Marshall kept his composure to make it 2-2!The home team soon scored their 3rd 15 mins from time when their superstar player got his brace to put them back into the lead ( this guy was amazing!) 

Desperately trying to equalise for the third time, we upped the tempo and Jamal broke down the left flank and picked out Zak Sharif who equalised for G2G for the third time.

With 4 minutes remaining in the game, they had scored again, their star man dribbling past our midfield, before taking a powerful shot that beat the keeper from outside the box, game over!

The final whistle was blown. Smiles all round; a truly memorable match. A trophy was awarded to the school for such an amazing experience.