How My Team Won The Dana Cup

by Julio
(Brazil)

My story is about how my team won the Dana Cup. My name is Julio and I play for one of the many soccer teams’ from Brazil. We were participating in Dana Cup that is hold in Denmark which is by the way one of the biggest youth tournaments in the world. My team was impressed by the quality of the teams playing in our group and also little scary that these teams will beat us with 10-0 or so.

However, before our first game, the coach told us that we will play with pressure on the ball holder and 1 on 1 marking. No one of us had any experience of this tactic but after our coach explained how it worked it was not so difficult. So, the game started and in the beginning my teammates and I had a lot of problems with finding our positions in this new tactic.

After 70 minutes the result was still 0-0 and we really needed to win the first game in order to qualify for the play-off. When the game was 85 minutes old, one of the opponents made a mistake because he was put under pressure by one of my teammates. So, my teammate conquered the ball, passed it to our forward, who scored 1-0. We managed to hold that result and the rest is history as people say.

We won the next 5 games and the whole tournament. So, even if we had never played in this formation before and despite that we were underdogs, the tournament trophy was on the plane to Brazil with us. What I’ve learned from this is that you should never be afraid of testing new things on the soccer field. Keep in mind that failure is the key to success.