Youths from across Egypt are participating in a futsal tournament, the winner of which will play an amateur Brazilian team, reports Ahmed Morsi Futsal, or five-a-side football, is not new in Egypt. What is original is that the winner of one particular tournament will get LE20,000 and the second placed team will get LE10,000. Moreover, the winning team will get to play a Brazilian five in the final. Nokia is the official sponsor of this global tournament which is now being staged in Egypt. The games are played in the car park of Cairo Stadium in Nasr City. Out of approximately 1,000 teams which wanted to register, only 128 teams are taking part, those who registered first. The age is from 15-25. The tournament's motto: Defend your turf. Five-a-side football is a variation of football in which each team fields five players rather than the usual 11. Other differences to football include playing on a smaller pitch, smaller goals, and a reduced game duration. Games are often played indoors. On the first day of this 13-day tournament, on Sunday, players came from as far away as Helwan and Giza, even from Syria. Teams were called Pharaohs, Shubra Tigers and the Shorties. Black t-shirts were provided for one team while the other played with whatever colours they brought. It's a knockout tournament in which a half is seven minutes long with no half-time. The first day, starting at 7pm, 32 games were played. Attendance in the stands was weak. Sunday's three-hour spectacle drew no more than a couple of hundred spectators. "Where is the Brazilian team?" asked many, but the Brazilians are not yet in Egypt. They are scheduled to arrive two or three days before the final match scheduled for 8 December. The referees are all Egyptian. Mohsen El-Tonsi is an account executive in Grey Company, responsible for the tournament's PR in Egypt. "The tournament has been played before in more than one country with the same idea and Nokia was its sponsor," El-Tonsi told Al- Ahram Weekly. Already this year, the event was played in Malaysia, Thailand and Australia. After Egypt, Saudi Arabia will be the next destination. "Nokia chose those countries basically because of the popularity of futsal and street football. The organiser also aims to gather youth for something useful. That's why there is no fee for registering in the competition. There will be superstars who will attend the tournament and watch the final matches but I don't know names so far." As for the Brazilian team, El-Tonsi said," Some of them are amateurs some professionals and play in the regular Brazilian league." None of them carry famous names. Ahmed Helmi El-Zohairi, 17, is a captain of one of the teams which played in the first day of the tournament. From Ain Shams, El-Zohairi and his friends learned of the tournament from the net. "We participate only for fun but we won't mind if we win," El-Zohairi said. They lost. Another captain Mohamed Gamal, 21, from the Pyramids area, was more confident. "All the players on my team play in clubs, not only in streets, so we will do something in this tournament," Gamal said. Gamal's optimism was well-placed; his squad won two matches on Sunday. "We heard about this tournament and registered through the Internet," he added. Hisham Hamdi, one of the executive organisers of the tournament, said it "basically aims to keep youth from deviating. It also aims to spotlight street football," Hamdi told the Weekly. "We want to get the best team to present Egypt against Brazil." There was even a Syrian team in the tournament. "The organisation is great, we don't have something like this in my country and it is a great thing for me to play against the Brazilian boys if we qualify," Mohamed Samer Qabel, the 22-year-old player/captain of the Syrian team, said. "I and my team participated before in the Vodafone Futsal League a week ago and it was also in Egypt. More than one member of my team came especially from Syria," Qabel said. The development of futsal is traced back to 1930 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the same year the inaugural World Cup was held in the country. The credit for this is given to Juan Carlos Ceriani who wanted a version of football to be played at the Young Men's Christian Associations (YMCAs) both indoors and outdoors. Credit is also sometimes given to a similar form of football developed in S�o Paulo, Brazil, and invented on basketball courts. Such forms of football were quickly adopted around South America, and many of the continent's greatest stars played futsal before migrating to full-size association football. The first common rules were reportedly published in S�o Paulo in 1936.
