Day 52 - Communicare Action Soccer League

Today was the day of our next match for Ruyterwacht, against Woodstock. We were both guaranteed to play because we both went to training so we were looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, today was extremely hot, too. So it was going to be tough and exhausting to run around for a while in this heat. We were still up for it though.

We got down to Atlantic at around 1:30, in preparation for the game to kick off at around 2.

The rest of the team didn't turn up until around 2:30. By that time, Selwyn already had a team together to play against another in a friendly so that there was actually a match going on. We didn't get on the court until 3ish, which was a lot later than expected. We played though.

It was exhausting in the heat, and I definitely played on longer than I should've, but Densel wanted me on so I wasn't going to argue. But we lost 6-5 in the end. Which I was miffed about because I only got an assist today. Their team was just a lot more physical than ours, and overpowered us. It was a really good game though which was alright. Should've done better though.

After the game we headed home, got showered and headed out to watch the Arsenal game. Despite Mixas being our trusted bar to go to, they were showing the rugby. So was everywhere else. So we got some drinks from Checkers and headed home to watch it at Berghof. 

3-0. Quality game. Sets us up perfectly for a big game against Monico on Tuesday, where we have to win by 3 to go through. It's going to be tough but we have the ability to do it.

We headed out for dinner, as we'd already had lunch at Berghof. Azille recommended to us a little Thai place just round the corner. It was incredible. I had green curry, with egg friend rice and it was amazing. Not too bad price wise either, spent around a tenner for a full, 3 course meal, of really good quality. Great shout Azille!

Harry

Day 51 - Drommedaris & Ruyterwacht Girls

Before I continue this post, I'd just like to say sorry that this post is coming late. As you'll find out, after what happened on Friday, I came home exhausted and pretty much went straight to bed! So I do apologize. Here it is though.

So today we had a lie in, as we didn't have to be in the Learning Centre until 1:30. However, I managed to wake up earlier than I'd hoped, and couldn't get back to sleep which was a nightmare. Oh well. We had a chilled out morning so it made up for the unnecessarily early start. We grabbed some lunch and headed off for the Learning Centre.

We got there, went for a quick walk with Azille to a portable library where she dropped some books back then headed back to upload pictures from Joes memory stick to their OneDrive account and help people that needed it.

Joe met us at 4, and we took a group of Ruyterwacht girls (plus Jaden) to Atlantic FC, where we met the Drommedaris girls team and got training underway. Martin took the Drommedaris girls, I took the Ruyterwacht girls. They were scheduled to play a friendly so we only had 30 minutes to train them, which didn't give me enough time to get my team ready in my opinion, but at half 5 we kicked off. Drommedaris vs Ruyterwacht.

Safe to say, Ruyterwacht lost. 4-1 to be exact. Despite Jodi being our rock at the back, we couldn't handle the Drommedaris team, who to be fair, have improved so much since we first started coaching them, which is nice to see. One of their players, Thakira (not sure how to spell it), is incredible. She's definitely the star of their team, and scored a quality hat trick to beat us. Jaden, Drommedaris' guest player, got the 4th!

After that we headed back to the Africa household. We planned to go to Grandwest with Jaden, as we haven't actually taken him out yet, but Yonick and Jodi wanted to watch Focus. So Martin went with them to watch the film while I took Jaden round the arcade, playing games and winning tickets to get Jaden a prize. I only spent R60 there, which is like £3, and we were playing for a good 2 hours. I was exhausted at the end of it. He's a very excitable 8 year old, and his eyes lit up when he saw the games, which was sweet.

After playing on the games for a couple of hours, and Jaden managing to get some bubbles with the tickets he won, we got some food, met Yonick, Jodi and Martin and went to head off. Yonick decided to go watch another film, so we left him at Grandwest and headed home.

When we got back I was exhausted, so I headed straight to bed, so sorry again for the late post.

Harry

Day 50 - Computer Workshop & Van Der Poel Football Club

50 days! Blimey. It's crazy to think we've already been out here for 50 days. Doesn't feel like it, for sure.

We started the day off with a 9am start at the Learning Centre. Azille wanted us to do a computer workshop for anyone that wants to sign up and learn bits about computers and how to use them. She's prepared a PowerPoint presentation for us to use, so all we'd be doing is going through it with the group.

Before we arrived, we thought that there were 2 people coming, as that's all we had confirmed as of Wednesday. When we got going though we had about 6 people, which was pretty decent considering we only had 9 available slots.

The presentation was split over 4 days, which we'd cover over the next 4/5 weeks. The first day, that we had to do today, was unbelievably basic. All it was, was going through the components of a PC, getting used to the mouse and typing. A couple of the students were still struggling, which felt crazy, because of the world of gadgets we live in. But if they've never used a computer before, how are they supposed to know? It was really interesting.

We ended the lesson at around 10:30, as we'd gone through the whole of day 1, and given them time to play around on the computers. We didn't have a session until 5, so Joe allowed us to go home for lunch.

I've been craving these little things called a Koeksister (possibly spelt wrong), which is like a spongey doughnut thing, covered in syrup, and topped with coconut shavings. It's heavenly. We headed down to this little shop by Joes that did these amazing ones, and got 4, Martin had 1, I had the rest. I even asked for the recipe, as I don't want to live in a world without these little beauts. The lady that I asked was a bit hesitant, but said that if I came back just before I left, she'd see what she could do. Happy days.

We then headed to Century City shopping centre to grab some lunch, a cheeky McDonald's, before heading home, where we chilled for a couple of hours.

We met Joe at the Learning Centre at 4:30, and headed to Van Der Poel where we had our only football coaching session of the day. These kids were buzzing. When we arrived they came up to us, giving us high fives and handshakes, asking about players and Arsenal and just generally excited to see us, which was really nice. We ended up having around 33 kids in the end. We only had a few balls and cones, so we decided to do the possession session, with Rondos, which we've had as our back up session, for when we have a little number of balls and many kids. These kids, although very excitable, were awful at it. They all wanted to get their head over the ball and dribble it. Even when we had one man in the middle trying to get it off them, they would hold onto the ball for ages, before trying to take it round the,  as we've seen so many times while out here. After talking to one of the Van Der Poel coaches, he was saying that quite often the problem with clubs is that they don't have anywhere near enough equipment for the coaches to put on actual sessions, and often they only have a couple of balls for loads of kids. So improving on this significantly is going to be difficult without a big investment from the South African Football Association into grassroots football. Shame the money they made from the World Cup didn't go into that.

We ended on a crossover match, which had one match going on between the older lot on the full length pitch, with the younger kids playing another match across the senior match. It's an end that Martin and I are starting to do more and more when we had a big group of kids, as it gets them looking up when with the ball as to not collide with the other match that's going on.

After that was over, we had a quick chat with the coaches and headed off. I had booked a place on an FA Licenced Coaches Club Webinar, which took place at 7pm our time, so it was a bit of a rush to get home. Thankfully I made it, and got to see it all, which was really interesting.

Tomorrow we have another lazy day, only needing to go into the Learning Centre at 1:30, before our session with Drommedaris girls in the afternoon. So it should be a good day.

Harry

Day 49 - Ysterplaat Crèche (1&2) & De Waveren High School

49 Days in, 7 weeks officially completed, under 5 weeks to go now.

We started the day off with our final session at the Ysterplaat crèche's. First up, Ysterplaat 1, with the younger kids. Now, as far as I'm aware we've had the same classes every week. However, for some reason the kids at Ysterplaat have just got naughtier and naughtier as weeks have progressed. The first week, they were really good and fun to coach, this week they were just a nightmare, messing around and being silly. I'm guessing it's because they've got comfortable with us, and have shown their true colours. Only they know, I guess. 

The second Ysterplaat crèche, on the other hand, were good as gold. After last week, we were a bit worried as they were very misbehaved, but this week they were brilliant. It was a joy to coach them. We even let them chose what activity they wanted to finish on, which they chose 'Duck, Duck, Goose', which we were happy to let them do.

Sadly, after half an hour with each class, it was time to say goodbye. Like yesterday, this was the last time we were scheduled to be at Ysterplaat, so the goodbye was the last one. Our schools are all changing next week so it'll be a fresh start for our last 4 weeks, which will be nice.

We didn't have to be at the Learning Centre today. We started De Waveren at 3, and finished a

L the crèche'so by 11:30, so went home for a bit to rest up and have lunch. After the nightmare, and poor behaviour from De Waveren a few weeks ago, we weren't exactly excited to be there again, so rest and recuperation was needed to ready ourselves for what we could've faced! Luckily, when we got there, we actually had 30 kids which was a lot better than the 80 we had last time. 

By the time they got out, ready and on the pitch, we'd eaten up a fair bit of time, so we just got them straight into a match, 15v15 on a rugby pitch. It actually worked pretty well which was nice to see. The attitude of the boys was still poor, as they were misbehaving a fair bit whenever we tried to talk to them. But we no longer have them scheduled, so we can now look forward to coaching at schools and clubs who will be listening and taking in what we say and working with us, rather than schools who don't seem to care.

At 4, we wrapped it up. Ruyterwacht were having their training session, ahead of their Communicare Action Soccer League game on Saturday. We've decided to go along to training, so we can work better with the team when we play, and hopefully grab some wins and get some points. After training we headed home. Menu for tonight? Chelsea vs PSG. Can't stand Chelsea so hoping PSG go through. Should be a good game nonetheless.

Harry

Day 48 - Riverton Crèche & Wesbank Football Club

Today we had pretty much the same as what we had last Tuesday, one session at Riverton crèche, followed by a break at the Learning Centre, followed by an afternoon session at Wesbank Football Club.

Now, I don't actually know the proper name of Wesbank football club. Last week I called it Gugulethu Football Club, this week I called it Wesbank. To be honest, I've heard it been called so many different names that it's just completely confused me. It's a football club, in a place called Wesbank. Let's leave it at that.

We met Joe at the Learning Centre at 8:30, before driving onto Riverton crèche. We got there, and before we'd even started setting up, the kids were on their way out. Funnily enough, they remembered the Kolo chant from last week and were singing that. Quality stuff. They seemed a lot more awake and loud than last week, which made it easier to have fun and play games with them.

We started off with the same as how we started last week, with them moving around in the area, and stopping when Martin blew the whistle.

We were surprised after, though, as Joe said he wanted to take over for one of our relay games. To be fair to the fella, he did really well. He did pretty much what we did for our relay sessions, but got the kids to crawl through their teams legs when they returned, which was a nice idea. Afterwards, he gave the reigns over to us, and retired from his duties, so we took the rest of the session. We pretty much did the same, and we even managed to get them putting the ball on the floor and kicking it, which we were really impressed by. A big improvement on last week.

Soon enough, it was time to go. That was our last session at Riverton so we wouldn't see the kids again. It was a bit of a shame to say goodbye as we were finally connecting with them, but there are other Crèche's that we're having to say goodbye to a lot of kids quite often.

After we stopped for lunch and a bit of a chill out at the Learning Centre, we headed off to Wesbank, to take our final session of the day. Last week the coaches asked for some exercises to do with only 1 ball, so we based our whole session around that. We split the group in half, Martin took one side with the ball, and I took the other and did various tag games, we eventually switched so both sides experienced both coaches, and exercises. We started off with 14 kids, and eventually had 40, after more and more kids turned up and wanted to play, which was interesting.

We ended the session with a 4 way match, where 2 teams would play a match in one direction, then when a goal was scored,the other 2 teams would play across in the other direction. It worked pretty well, thankfully.

Soon enough, that was it, and we left Wesbank, pleased after another successful session, and headed home. I'm exhausted so aim to not have too late a night, as we have a busy day tomorrow.

Harry

Photos From Day 47 - Chapman Peak Road

Photos From Day 47 - Cape Of Good Hope

Photos From Day 47 - Cape Point

Photos From Day 47 - Boulders Beach