Tournoi de Walhain
Football tournament for small boys
The boys from Royal Racing Club Boitsfort running for the first price trophy after winning the tournament "Tournoi de Walhain" Saturday 30 June 2009. Photo: ©Erik Luntang
Since I was kicked out of the football team, for not being good enough, as a seven-year-old boy, I never went to a football match for private pleasure. On Mondays the sports edition in my newspaper was the first I took out, and that went directly to the trash! I never understood why people wasted time in front of the TV watching football. I think you get the point now.
The first football match I participated as a grownup was an ordered photo assignment, which I got paid for. I was asked to cover the semi finals in the national Danish top league for one of the national news agencies.
Actually I liked photographing football, it was a sport in itself to get the really good picture and then I began to read the sport pages in the papers, also on Mondays. This was back in 1989 and since then I have photographed an unknown amount of top-professional matched all over Europe. The biggest event being the 1998 FIFA World Cup. Last match I covered was back in 2003 and with that the sports edition on Mondays went back to the bin again.
Last year my six-year-old son began playing football at the Royal Racing Club Boitsfort, near our home in Brussels. The club is located at the Trois Tilleuls Stadium where my older daughter also plays tennis. This was suddenly new experience for me to get used to something new in the world of football. Bringing my son two times a week for training and now and then a match on Saturdays. Now the payments is meeting other parents and see a happy boy.
Unfortunately I did bring my camera once for training and then again this weekend. We left home at noon on Saturday driving half an hour outside Brussels to Walhain. It was a tournament with different clubs and a winner would at the end of the day be found. The camera equipment was very simple – just a 35 mm, which is not a lens to use for this kind of sports event. But the main part was to watch.
It was great fun being there and watch the boys play. There is a completely different atmosphere at such a match compared to the professionals. The boys take it very serious and are very concentrated on winning. Their technique never makes me stop admire them. They are small boys, but they master the difficult game it is to play together and pass on the ball to the others with precision. At the same time they can also louse concentration and forget they have to play football.
They also act differently when they have lost a game. Some seem not to care about it and others start crying when they see where it is going. One team playing against my sons could only watch as my son’s team scored all the goals. It became too much for one of the boys, he began crying and so much that he had to be replaced.
At the final match the other team had an excellent goalkeeper. I was amazed to see how good he was. No ball passed him in the first part, but then things began to go wrong. He missed more and more. With that he got more and more angry with himself. So much that he began to cry. His couch tried to calm him down with no success and his mother had to take over. The little boy managed to take care of his goal in between the crying. His team lost and there was nobody who could calm him down, not even his mother. He was very angry and unhappy to be number two in the tournament.
My son’s team was very happy, of course. They took the first price and enjoyed the photo session with their trophy.
And the farther?
He drove home with a new experience you don’t get at the big stadiums filled up with spectators and the professionals playing. With These small boys this opens a new and very interesting real world of football. For the pictures? Better bring the proper lenses next time.
For more pictures go to the article “Small boys football tournament“