General
- Thursday February 12th, 2009 @ 23:17
ST PATS FUTSAL TEAM BEGIN TITLE DEFENCE
St Patrick's Athletic kicked off their defence of their National Futsal crown in Dublin City University last Saturday in what should be a hugely competitive tournament over the coming weeks.
This year St Pat's Futsal team has a new manager Jose Ferreira from Portugal who has brought together a squad of mainly Brazilian and Irish players to play for the Saints.
“This year I believe the competition will be wide open. There is a lot of change within the teams with Sporting Fingal, Wexford Youths, Bray, Dundalk and Shamrock Rovers all looking very strong.
We played Wexford Youths in our first game on Saturday and we were leading 3-2 until the last five minutes when a lack of concentration let them equalise and then they scored again in the last 30 seconds.
That was hugely disappointing but it's a lesson learned and it's still only the early stages of the tournament.
I was delighted with the way the team bounced back when they took on Sporting Fingal later in the day. Sporting Fingal to me look like one of the top teams and we finished 1-1 after a very tight and high quality game”.
St Pat's team face a tough challenge when they face Bray in the next round of games this weekend at the Tallaght Arena and hopefully Jose will prove to be “the special one” and the team can build on their opening round performances.
We would encourage fans to get behind the Pat's Futsal team and go and take a look at this facst paced, higly skilful emerging sport - the second round of games kick off at Basketball Arena, Tallaght on Saturday.
11.00am - Shamrock Rovers v Bray Wanderers
11.50am - Dundalk v Sporting Fingal
12.40pm - Bray Wanderers v St Pats Athletic
1.30pm - Shamrock Rovers v Wexford Youths
2.20pm - Dundalk v Shelbourne
3.10pm - Sporting Fingal v Wexford Youths
4.00pm - St Pats Athletic v Shelbourne
The opening round results were as follows:
Shamrock Rovers [2] - Dundalk [3]
Bray Wanderers [3] - Sporting Fingal [4]
St Pats Athletic [3] - Wexford Youths [4]
Dundalk [4] - Bray Wanderers [4]
Shamrock Rovers [9] - Shelbourne [0]
Sporting Fingal [1] - St Pats Athletic [1]
Wexford Youths [11] - Shelbourne [3]
