Interview with Raymond Chan 

Q.   In your first interview, you mentioned an unusual football game.  What year was that?

Form 5, 1973, I think… not quite sure, you know, I am getting old.

Q.   Was it an interschool match?

No, just a special Christmas 7-a-side tournament organized by the school during the Xmas, New Year holidays.    

Q.  Grade B or C?

If I remembered correctly, the tournament was divided into 2 divisions, one lesser one for Forms 1-3 and another for the higher Forms. You just form your team and enroll, and it was a knock out tournament. So you played more than 1 game and more than 1 day if you were lucky to move on to the next rounds. Of course we were in the higher division.

Q.   You said it was 7-a-side?  And your tem was short: what happened – 1 or 2 player no show, no subs?

Yes it was 7-a-side played on the grass field.

Game on grass field

At the time, we were more worry about playing time than lack of stamina, so I think we only registered 7 players. 

Q.   6 players against 7 is a lot more difficult than 10 vs.11.  What was on your mind when you started the game?

Yes it was very difficult for 6 players to cover the whole grass field. We came a long way, knocked out some teams in higher Forms and did not want to finish the tournament there, and we called the slept-in player and found out that he would come in later, so just asked everyone to play harder, run a bit more and hopefully won that game and moved on to next round.

Q.  Describe the game(s).     

It was a hard fought game, the other team was very good too, and they had a very good player, Cho Siu Ming, from Form 4. Our team was not too shabby either, like I said, I hand-picked each position player from different classes, kind of like a ‘united’ team. It was Xmas. Weather was cool and it was the first game in the day, but we missed our best player, Wong Wun, who slept in and was on his way. Wong was the commander in our attacks.  Both Cho and Wong were members of Grade A School Team.  I played for B Grade. Without Wong Wun, our mid-fields looked different; instead of playing our usual quick passing game, we were playing long passes up the middle and looked for mistakes from the other team. It was a very close game, we fought hard to make up for the short hand, and we finally won, not sure whether by 1 goal or by number of corners. (Very likely by corners, since I have absolutely no memory of how we scored.)

Q. So what happened finally?

Wong Wun

Raymond Chan

We moved on to the final, the missing player Wong Wun finally showed up in the afternoon. However, all our tanks were empty due to the 6 vs 7 game, and we lost to a ‘ordinary’ (haha, at least I saw it that way) team who just out-ran us, (this team had a player who ran 100M and 4x 100M for the school team) We had possession most of the time, but 2 long balls over the head of our last defense, and both scored. We only got silver for the tournament.

Thank you, Ray.