On November 28th in Trinity’s Botany Bay, Egg Fried Reus took down Integer Milan 8-6 to be crowned champions of this semester’s Trinity five-a-side cup competition. Five-a-side is a more casual form of football/soccer played on a hard surface with smaller goals, but make no mistake, these matches are intensely competitive. A breezy Friday afternoon, the court was still wet from the morning’s rain, making for a bruisy and high-tempo contest. The standout from the winning side was Finn Murphy, who netted four goals. Integer Milan fought valiantly, with Enda Shaughnessy scoring a beautiful header to take a 3-2 lead early on, and kept the score within one goal for most of the match.
The five-a-side league is one of the largest student-led organisations at Trinity, with fifty-six teams entered for this semester’s season. Any group of students can enter a team for a fee of €140, with any level of prior skill. Coursemates often band together to form teams; Integer Milan, as the name might suggest, is primarily made up of Maths students fighting for the pride of their course.
Many teams provide students with a chance to follow their results, indeed a subculture within five-a-side is the team Instagram pages: “About half the teams have dedicated club Instagrams” explains Dylan O’Rafferty, a social media and competition organiser, “a few of them are fairly big, like Mathletes [from Division 4] have about 300 followers”. This social media presence has led to rivalries between teams, with Dylan pointing me to one in particular: Mount Joy versus Dropouts. “I think they have a few mates in common, because they’ve just been @ing each other in nearly every single game caption. Mount Joy have been like, “won again today”, and that Dropouts are going to lose.”
Students go all out for their teams: “I was playing against a team and a fella dislocated his shoulder against the wall”, said O’Rafferty. The wall on the left side of the court is notorious for creating big moments, good and bad, due to being the one side that the ball is permitted to be bounced off of, allowing feats of skill unique to five-a-side.
Five-a-side consists of six divisions based on levels of skill, with teams competing against other teams in their division to finish top during the regular season portion. The Division 1 regular season was claimed by Elche C.F., a team of Spanish students, winning a four-team tiebreaker which included Integer Milan and last year’s holders Egg Fried Reus, by having the highest goal difference. Determined by each team’s final standing, they are then seeded into six different postseason tournaments, which see the best lower division teams compete against higher division teams for the chance to end the semester with a possible league title as well as a cup title. A good performance from a lower division team could mean promotion to a higher one next semester: “It could be that a team that came 6th in Division 1 is playing the winner of Division 4” explains Dylan O’Rafferty. “A team in Division 3 might end up being worse than Division 4, because we just don’t know [until they play].”
The highly competitive top tournament dubbed Champions League 1 is composed primarily of the best teams from Divisions 1 and 2, this year featuring the top two from an overachieving Division 3, Mount Joy and Dianamo Kyiv. However, they both lost in the first round, proving just how steep the talent level becomes at the top. Besides Egg Fried Reus’ victory, some other tournament results from the day were Dairy B FC winning 10-8 over Real Medrid in “Europa League 2”, the fourth level tournament; impressively, Division 5 champions Sools defeated Gargle FC 12-7 to take home ‘Europa League 1’, the third level tournament.
Another season will begin next semester, with teams returning for another chance to become champions themselves. This also means a chance for any newcomers to form a team and prove their worth as the best five-a-side team in Botany Bay.
