The Fall of Les Faucons

So another fun thing recently was the Ecole Francaise Internationale de Dacca (EFID) annual futball (um, that’s soccer for our American readers) tournament. Atticus as you know attends the French school (EFID) and they hosted the event. It was a pretty big affair, with a whole bunch of international schools attending, and over 350 players (the newspaper said later.)

So, basically it was a bunch of elementary school children playing futbol and having a nice fun day outside- what is more adorable than this? Not much. Atticus played with his classmates on the team Les Faucons (The Falcons). Jon, Sam, and DP volunteered to help keep track of Les Faucons over the day and get them to the field when needed – as well as helping rotating players in an out of the game, and of course, jumping around and cheering a lot.

Les Faucons, well, what can we say. They had great spirit, but as we soon saw, lacked some basic elements necessary for tournament futbol- one of which was actually knowing how to play futbal. Also, while most of the other teams spent the pre-game periods stretching or practicing, Les Faucons were generally to be found buying crepes over at the concession table. (Yes, this is true, and yes, they were quite good crepes.)

The first game they played was against the NGO school for street children, which made for a somewhat awkward cheering situation for Les Faucons’ fans. We just opted to cheer for everyone, because you just can’t really cheer against homeless children. Les Faucons (somehow) won this game, and the next game they played was against the Australian School. This was an easier cheering situation morally, but the Australian school kids were a rough bunch and they blew Les Faucons away. In another match, Les Faucons beat the Canadian School and got to advance to the semi-finals.

Unfortunately though, despite the day’s earlier successes, the semi-finals were a bloodbath. The first round was against Bangladesh International Tutorial (BIT). Not only did these guys seem a little bigger, they also seemed to have played soccer before and understood things like which direction to run, how to pass the ball, etc… so it was a pretty one sided affair. As one of Atticus’ friends’ dad put it “Boy, our guys just don’t what the bloody hell they’re doing out there, do they?”

After the brutal loss against BIT there was one last game to go for third place or last place, and it was against – uh-oh, the Australian School, who had annihilated Les Faucons just hours before. Les Faucons had also lost a few teammates who hadn’t managed to make it back after lunch, and were feeling a bit under-confident. The lack of confidence was probably well placed. The kids were destroyed. As teammate after team mate was carried off the field in injury, and the one poor kid on the team that actually knew how to play (and was pretty good) struggled to keep the game together, it was really just a losing battle. Les Faucons fell to defeat.

They did all still get medals for participating though, and had a fun time overall. Possibly more fun than even the winning teams, come to think of it- Les Faucons got to play futbol, but eat their cake too!
Here are a few pics from the day.