Courtesy: UEFA.com


Vídir ready for futsal adventure

Thursday 7 August 2008

by Stefán Stefánsson from Reykjavik

A second-division football team from a town of fewer than 1,500 people, Vídir Gardi will take their bow on the continental stage on Sunday when they become the first Icelandic club to compete in the UEFA Futsal Cup.

European chance
Last January the annual Icelandic indoor tournament was played under futsal rules, and Vídir reached the final, losing to Valur Reykjavík. With the capital club involved in UEFA Champions League qualifying and in the midst of defending their domestic football title, they passed on the opportunity to play in the UEFA Futsal Cup and Vídir opted to take their place. "We know this could be expensive, after all there are only about 1,500 people in our town, but all the players and the coach are putting their money into this," chairman Einar Jón Pálsson told uefa.com. "This will be an adventure for this small club, the town and hopefully the KSÍ [Football Association of Iceland]. People have not yet realised what we are going into but we are serious and always prepared."

Skövde example
They kick off their Preliminary round Group A bid in France against Politechnik Yerevan on Sunday before meeting hosts Roubaix Futsal and Cypriot side FC Parnassos, with just one Main round place on offer – in a pool involving 2005 champions Action 21 Charleroi. Vídir know it will be tough to emulate Skövde AIK, a lower league football team from Sweden who have represented their nation in the last two UEFA Futsal Cups and both times won their Preliminary round group. Yet they lie third in Iceland's second tier, pushing for promotion as they attempt to recapture their glory days when they finished seventh in 1986 and reached the cup final the next year. January's feat has already added to the roll of honour.

'No pressure'
"We have played in all the indoor tournaments over the years but not done particularly well until the last one," Pálsson said. "We do not know anything about our opponents in the group. Many of those clubs specialise in futsal so their name will not tell us anything. We have not trained specially for futsal – there is no time because of our success in the Icelandic second division – but we have used the weekends to train, mostly to refresh our knowledge of the rules and freshen up our tricks. This will be exciting; there is no pressure, only fun but we go into every tournament intending to win, plain and simple."





Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com