Lions advance to the Hebiguchi cup semi-final after penalty shoot-out against Celtic

Last Saturday, our senior team was up against Shanghai Celtic FC in Hebiguchi cup quarter-final. It was much better weather than last week as it was dry and around 12 degrees. We got Marcel back as goalie who almost recovered from his shoulder injury ! With Othmane suspended and a few players missing, we had a thin squad.

In the first 15 minutes, Shanghai Celtic opted for pressing and quick long balls forward. We couldn’t get into our rhythm and were losing the balls too fast. To make matters worse, Nils our sweeper accidently hit the bounced ball from his thigh with his arm… The referee made a weird decision to award Celtic a penalty.

As per FIFA rules, we can clearly say No No No!

If the ball is moving at a fast pace and you are unable to move your arm/hand out of the way of the ball after it hits your leg, it’s not handball.

Was the handball intentional?
Did the player make the body bigger?
Was an advantage gained from the handball?

As Marcel our keeper is a lawyer, he knows what is right and what is wrong. So in this case, he stopped the penalty.

Celtic slown down a bit and we created some opportunities after we swapped a few players positions. We should have scored at least one or two goals in this spell of the game.

In the second half, we started much better and were taking the initiative. The Celtics were no longer dangerous and had no shots on target. We on the other hand should have scored… Mounaim, especially got into a perfect position but he made one or two steps too many.

As it goes in football, when you don’t take your changes you are asking for trouble. Trouble came indeed when our defender decided to pass the ball back to our keeper. However, that ball ran short on the wobbly pitch and the Celtic striker accepted our gift.

That was a big blow and it took us a few minutes to recover from it. However, our captain Peter shown us the way with a great solo run and a cool finish to get our well deserved equalizer.

As the game ended in 1-1, we went straight to penalties. 4 for each team. We knew that with Marcel in the goal, our chances were good as long as we would score our penalties. What happened next is that we scored 3 out of our 4 penalties and Celtics only 1. Believe it or not Marcel stopped 3 penalties. His performance to stop 4 penalties in one game went straight into the Lions history book. Lions scorers were Hira-san, Romain K. & Mounaim.