Line up: Nicolas Leong, Fulvio Manini, Dave Cooper, Jon Bett, Maurizio Dematteis (Ike Fortune), Chris Pereira, Bright Opia, Tomas Miranda, Phil Mc Cormick (Kelly Emanuel), Matteo Baldo, (Stuart Aitken), Yazid Sawal.

Scorers: 25^th Bright Opia, 65^th Yazid Sawal, 80^th Bright Opia

Coming to that very important game against the league leaders, we had a Master Plan that we were hoping would give us enough stability and firepower. However this is still only Cosmoleague and we found ourselves with 2 last minutes defections and 2 key players showing up nonchalantly when the game was starting. We passed from Master Plan to no plan and started the game with the 11 players available.

 As a consequence our first 10 minutes of the game were quite dazed and confused not to mention blur, while Hotspurs started brilliantly with good geometries and a lot of pushing forward from their impressive right full back. Despite their slight superiority, the blues did not manage to create real danger a part from long distance shots from their heavy artillery Marko and Joerg.

 After some brainstorming sessions on the pitch we managed to find our assets and got back to our shape. We took more control of the ball and started to create some embryos of attacks, nothing much to be honest. Our first goal came from a great long ball to Yazid who headed it perfectly back for Bright “Michael Essien” Opia who unlashed a powerful drive well parried by Spurs goal keeper but Opia having followed is shot was again at the reception and looking up to the sky he saw the famous bald eagle passing by and just slotted the ball in its basket and the rest is history.

We started the second half with the same 11 who did well in the first half and got more and more control of the game. Hotspurs were now trying to hit us with rapid counter attacks and they almost managed to equalize when a cross was not well cleared by our defense and I still don’t know how the diminutive opponent managed to kick this one over the bar. That was the alarm bell we needed to get back to serious business. A couple of changes upfront gave us more attacking solutions and we started to create real danger against the tiring Hotspurs back 3. Kelly missed what he misses almost every game, but Yazid remembered that he is our top scorer and with a great touch lobbed the goal keeper and gave us that very important cushion. From then on it was a more relaxed game for us but we still had to cope with the quality of play that guys like Abbas and Marko can create. We created danger every time we were going forward and it was man of the match Bright with a cracker from 25 yards who gave the final blow to Hotspurs hopes of recovery.

Thanks for the refs and Hotspurs for a pleasant game, played in a good competitive spirit.