West London Community College Football Team
This year, West London Community College took part in the Middlesex County Football Association PAN disability football league.
The league has been running for several years now and is growing each season. It provides an excellent opportunity for adults diagnosed with a disability to participate in competitive football, while taking their ability into consideration and ensuring the game is fair.
West London Community College Football Club was set up in 2008 with funding from the Football Foundation. After two failed seasons of trying to organise regular matches with various organisations, Jon Whittingham from the Middlesex FA disability team invited us to take part in the league which meets at Goals Soccer Centre on the first Sunday of every month between September and June. The league is held under the five a side format with games lasting no longer than 10 minutes.
We initially joined a “championship” league, but the opposing players were too able for the team to compete against and we were losing games every month 10 – 0, 9 – 1 etc. So from February 2011 we joined the “league” league and were instantly more comfortable.
We only played 13 games in 3 months but won twelve of them and finished third from six overall for the season, which was excellent considering the teams finishing above us played 24 games overall.
As 2011 came around the team was looking for a new sponsor. Anna Kennedy Online stepped up and kindly donated money to ensure the team would run for at least the next two years and allow the players to travel to Gran Canaria again this year to participate in the Festival Del Balon International Football Disability Tournament. June soon rolled in and the team was looking forward to participating in the MCFA county Cup. In this format each team would play each other once, and the results would go into a league table with the top two teams competing in a final.
WLCC FC had a very successful tournament. Beating teams such as Harrow all Stars 3-1, Hayes and Yeading DASH 2-1, Hounslow Strikers 5-0, North West London 3-2, Enfield B 3-1.
The final beckoned and it was WLCC FC v Harrow all Stars.
Harrow went up 1 – 0. WLCC pulled it back to 1 -1 with Lee Clancy scoring the extremely important equaliser. Harrow again went in front with 3 minutes remaining after a mistake by the WLCC FC goal keeper. Mark Macey then scored a beautiful goal from his own half to pull it back to 2 -2 . Extra time awaited, with one minute of the game remaining before we were due to go to penalties, Sagar Koriya stepped up and finished after a wonderful through pass from Josh Beacham to win the trophy for WLCC.