Three matches in five days without a single minute of practice. No wonder Billabong International from Santacruz went down 8-2 against Cuffe Parade’s G D Somani in an under-16 boys Division IV clash of the MSSA inter-school tournament at the Castrol Schools Sports Centre on Saturday.

Sourtat Ghatiwala slammed three, with Santosh Ram, Sourik Banerjee, Siddharth Thappar, Sumeet Khana and Fenil Jain chipping in with one each to complete the tally for the winning team, while Ihaad Khan scored both the goals for the losing side.

“It’s tough to play without practice. We simply lack stamina,”says Rishikesh Malviya of Billabong. “We start getting stomachaches within the first 10 minutes of the action. That hugely hampers our efforts to put up a bold show,”adds the 13-year-old. The Billabong team practices once a week at Balkan Ji Bari for which it shells out Rs 600 for one hour.

On Tuesday, Billabong had gone down 5-0 to Poddar before drawing 1-1 against Little Angels on Thursday. “We managed to come down to the ground a bit early on Thursday before our match against Little Angels which had given us about 15 minutes to warm up on the side ground,”informs Johan Palkar. “Since we were a bit worked up, we managed to hold Little Angels to a 1-1 draw. Imagine what we can do if we could get daily practice,”says the oldest player of the team at 15.

“The ground at Balkanji Bari where we practice is very small compared to the MSSA. And we simply don’t get a hang of the ground if we step on it only during the matches,”opines Dhruv Tandon. “The technique we are used to on the small grounds comes to naught on a big ground at MSSA,”he adds.

... contd.