CHAPTER 14- NEW YEAR AT SACRAMENTO AND IM SOCCER
New Year was round the corner and we decided we shouldn’t stay put in Davis for that; else it would be as lame as Christmas was. After some discussion, we scrapped plans of going to San Francisco because we had to cut our expenditure as much as possible because of the stupendous amount we had spent in the last few days. So we decided to go to Sacramento instead. After all, it’s the capital of the state of California; there’s got to be some celebration. After some looking up on the net, we found out that there were celebrations with fireworks in Old Sacramento near the bridge.
AZ was also back from Seattle, so the 6 of us (Varun, MS, Jaggy, JB, Dwarak and I) sent off to Sacramento on the Yolobus in the evening of the 31st. There were a lot of people there, and there were lots of things to see. The whole area had a festive atmosphere about it. Many stalls had been put up, and there were performances by flame throwers, belly-dancers, musicians who were playing everything from blues to rock and it kept us busy for hours. It was soon close to midnight and there were fireworks at 11 pm, which were really grand. It lasted for about ten minutes and it reminded us of diwali, only without the noise associated with it. The sky was lit by the merry fireworks.
We learned that there was a ball drop at midnight in downtown Sac, a mile or so from here and so we set out to watch that. The streets were crowded. Really crowded. It reminded me of Ranganathan street in Chennai. It was a mixture of all types of people, of all color and all sections of the society. People were shoving the person next to them without any botheration. There were also a lot of racist taunts being thrown freely. I guess it’s the crowd syndrome. When you are in a crowd, you are not conscious of your actions because you know a whole bunch of people are going to be held responsible for your individual actions too. So you can be a lot freer since the attention is not on the individual. The same bunch of people who were there that night, taunting and shoving people, might be dignified business magnates or goody-two-shoes students in the day, but that night they were each just a nobody but as a group a part of a crowd. And so they let themselves loose. We witnessed a girl being molested by a gang of people in the crowd, without anyone being able to do anything about it and quite a few scuffles between gangs of people. We wondered what we had gotten ourselves into and worried if we would get to see the New Year at all.
Thankfully we got through pretty safe and managed to squeeze into a place where we could see the ball drop a few metres away. 10..9....5...3..2..1.. and there were choruses of happy new year all around us. We were wished by numerous people thrice as big and strong as us and shook our hands, and we nervously shook them and greeted them back. We managed to ease out of the crowd and get to a free street and thanked our stars for coming out in one piece. We called a cab as it was too late for the yolobus to ply to Davis and we waited for an hour nervously on the now-deserted street, eyeing suspiciously every shady looking guy walking in our direction. The cab came at last and we got home at about 2 am.
The next morning, we got to know from the news update that about 5 people had been killed in independent incidents by drunk or lunatic people, in the mood to do something a bit too exciting in the New Year. We were relieved we weren’t one of those five poor souls at the wrong place at the wrong time.
[From this point, my style of blogging is going to change. I am not necessarily going in chronological order. When I bring up a subject, I am going to breeze through the winter quarter with everything related to that subject. I had to do this to make it crisp and end this ever-continuing story… We have come to the 14th part and just half of the trip is over. I promised to end it in 20, and so I will]
The winter quarter was about to start in a couple of days, and we decided it was time we had more fun this time as this may be the last one in Davis. We decided to use the Activities and Recreation Centre (ARC) more often to play one of the loads of sports it has facilities for. The ARC is one of the highlights of UCD, housing an indoor soccer stadium, about 20 badminton courts, about 10 squash courts, a basketball stadium, a rock climbing zone, a few tennis courts, some baseball pitches, a running track among others. I was quite surprised why we hadn’t used it much last quarter and I realized we were too busy chatting or lounging around at home that we didn’t have the time to come here. For the first half of the quarter, I was a regular there, playing soccer with the whole gang or badminton most often with Varun and sometimes one of the girls, and squash a few times. We played soccer at the Hutchinson stadium in the evening and made some friends with some other UCD soccer enthusiasts.
We also decided it would be a lot of fun if we signed up for the intramural soccer tournament, where we would compete against other teams professionally in the soccer stadium. We were pretty upbeat, as we felt Americans can’t even play football (yeah they can play soccer but hey that’s a different name) and so we may have a good chance of going all the way. Little did we know what we were in for. So we registered our team “Blue flamez”, with AZ as our captain, me, JB, JD, MS, Varun, Dwarak, Deepak, Hyun (our Korean roomie) and a couple of his friends Yun San and Leister.
In the trials, we discovered Deepak’s talent as a goalie and amazing willingness and enthusiasm to work hard to improve as a keeper, which is the most important for a player and so he became our star goalie, though Dwarak seemed as good if not better than him at it. At the end of the day, it’s the passion for the game and how much each one enjoys it that counts. Mahesh was a semi-pro as he had played a lot of competitive soccer at the school level in Kerala. With these soccer training sessions, Mahi and Goalie (Deepak) started hang out with us more often.
So that left our team of 12, with just three professional players- AZ, who had been playing all his life and was a great overall player; Mahi, who had played at competitive levels and was very good with the ball; Leister, who had played the IMs before and was a consistent player with great tackling abilities with great energy levels and the rest, amateurs- Yun San, who was quite talented with the ball but quite raw; Hyun, who didn’t have much skill with the ball but had amazing strength and stamina thanks to the 3 years he spent in the Korean army; me, whose mind was as good as a pro’s due to the amount of football I watch and quickness on my feet coupled with good anticipation but with not much on-field experience and also with atrociously poor stamina levels which renders all good qualities of a footballer useless by not letting him play much; JB, with great footballing knowledge and great judgment and anticipation but again no experience on the field; Dwarak, with great power in his legs which were capable of unleashing ferocious shots but had chicken legs and he got injured as often as Owen Hargreaves does after his move to Man Utd; JD, who had amazing pace and will-power but lacked composure and tried a trick too many when he had the ball; MS who was strong and graceful but lacked the speed and acceleration needed in football due to his rather…er…footballish shape (:D); Varun, who wasnt the swiftest and most nimble-footed at soccer but was a fierce competitor nonetheless and Deepak, who hadn’t watched or played much football and wasn’t even aware of some of its intricate rules but his amazing enthusiasm to learn and improve neutralized his shortcomings. That wasn’t a title winning team by any stretch of the imagination, but we felt we could improve if we all peak at the right time and practiced often and hope the Americans are as bad at soccer as we thought they were.
JB, AZ and I spent a lot of time during the quarter, discussing about the formations we should employ and who should play where and what kind of game we should play. We took it pretty seriously right through the quarter and the enthusiasm didn’t dwindle amidst our heavy academic workloads. We let out all our frustrations in other aspects of UCD life on the soccer. But the results of the matches weren’t really as rosy as we expected.
We found that lots of Asians, Africans, Europeans and worst of all, many South Americans including Brazilians and Argentines, played for each team in the league. Many of these players could play for any professional Indian club; that’s how good they were. Even the Americans who played were really good in some aspect or the other. Teams which didn’t have passing or understanding had strong guys who played physical games (Russians were the most notorious) and could unleash powerful shots from far. Teams which had nimble players with quick feet and skill (mostly Brazilians) passed and wriggled their way into the goal with the ball.
We went with the frame of mind that we’ll do well as the opponents will be Americans who can’t play much and we were punished for that by a royal thrashing from the first team we encountered, whose passing blinded us and we all were in the same end of the pitch at a particular time. We had no coordination going and we couldn’t really get one strategy working for us and we were humiliated that match.
But then we regrouped after that and never underestimated our opponents from then on and we played much better and even enjoyed successes in the way but most importantly had a lot of fun. We would look forward to Wednesday’s game and for Friday’s training sessions all week and also the dinner at Sam’s with a free drink the girl who ran the place gave us for visiting every week, after the session. I also invested in a lot of gear including knee braces, shin pads, ankle guards, tube socks, bandages for the one too many injuries I had but the fun we had was worth the money and blood spent.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
