Today was my finals for the National Water Polo Championship 2010, C Division. The night before the competition, I could not sleep, thinking about what will be the outcome of the competition. I know I should be optimistic about the game and that my mindset is to win, is to give it my all. However, there is this feeling tugging me, the feeling that I am sorry to say is losing. ACSI is a notch above us, though it is not an impossible task to overcome them, it would be difficult, very difficult indeed.

Before I went down to play I was nervous. I had to calm myself down and tell myself that I just had to play my best. Gulping down a few mouthful of redbull, I hoped that it would come into good use during the match.

The match was against ACSI, a strong rival of my school. At the preliminaries, we lost to them 8-3. However, both HCI and ACSI won all of their remaining matches and thus we met again in the finals.

At the finals, I can say that I did not perform well, or maybe I always did not perform well. You might say that I might be underestimating myself but I do not think so. During the finals, I was often lost, caught between attacking and defending. Whenever I wanted to swim towards the opponent side of the pool to support my teammates, the possession of the ball always changes side and I have to swim back. Thus, I gradually stop swimming to the opponent side as I was fearful that the ACSI guy that I was marking would do a counter break and we would from there lost a point. I just stayed where I was, neither attacking nor really defending. I feel that me being in the team and me not being in the team does not really make much of a difference. I do not score to help my team and this can be supported by me only having a total of 3 goals in all the matches that I played while others are averaging at a total goals of ten and above. My defending is also not good so is my stamina and I often remain stationary, refusing to swim after I have just sprinted to chase the opponent.

I feel that I am useless and did not know why coach put me into the team. Maybe for the only reason that I can swim quite fast and that was all. My technique and skill cannot match up to some of my teammates. Slowly, my teammates are catching up with me on swimming and I would gradually be left behind……

Coming back to the finals, the score in the first half was 2-1 in favour of ACSI and it was quite good as we were putting up a good fight. However, our stamina slowly decrease and we started to let in free men and counter breaks in the second half where ACSI increased the margin by a fair bit and in the end, the match ended with 10-4 in favour of ACSI.

Although the margin is quite big, I feel that we have done the best we could. We have put in all our effort to want to win this competition, but ACSI was generally fitter in terms of stamina, faster in swimming and much stronger in physical strength. These caused them to win us by such a huge margin in the second half. However, I will not stop here. I will continue training to fight for the team and to fight for myself. I will come back stronger again next year in B’ division and hopefully I will know what I am doing during the match but that all depends whether coach will put me in the team. Nevertheless, I am going to train hard to convince coach to put me in the team next year so that I can get another chance to prove my worthy. I will not want to fail those who believe in me again. ACSI you guys better watch your back.