West meets East again!

The Australian Vikings futsal teams, the men's team and the selected U-16 boys'team paid visit to Chengdu from Oct 13 to Oct 27.the U-16 boys team participated in the first ever Futsal tournament, co-organised by the Sichuan provincial education comittee and Sanajon Pharmaceutical Group, in the high school group with other 15 school futsal teams across the whole province.
The men's team played a demonstration game with a local university futsal at the opening ceremony. Both the men's and the boys' team were impressive to the local players in their smooth tactics and individual skills.
This tour made the history in China that they were the first ever foreign futsal teams came to play in the mainland China.
The boys team ended up at the third place in the high school group after they beat the tradional powerhouse, the Santai middle school team, in the semifinal on the penalty shootout. After the tournament, the boys were chanlleged by a number of school teams and there were more teams left expected to play in the next year.
The men's team got an all win result playing with 4 local men's team in 6 games. The exciting game was that with the team of university of nationalities, which was composed of all the palyers from newly disbanded Chengdu Futsal, once coached by the brazilian coach Farinha. The viking got 3:0 at the half, but shortly after the break, the game was tied by the brilliant goals on the Chinese Side. On the last second of the game, Viking took advantage of a free kick by gently deflecting the ball to the left side of the goal post, and pulling out a player from the wall at the same time to score the decisive one.
The game with the univeristy of electronic science and technology futsal team in its stadium on the Oct.26 evening was the most attractive. There were a crowd of 2000 in the stadium on that evening. Obviously, this was the first indoor futsal game played on the campus, and most of the audience was the first time access to the futsal. The Viking won 5-2 in her last game in China. After the game, the Viking number two player, Luke, received a bunch of his first Chinese femal fans around the Changing room, and the girls were really elated to have photos with their hero.

by Li Jing