The Curtin University in Perth WA, hosted it’s first major Futsal Tournament, to showcase it’s great new facilities, which included seating for over 1000 spectators. The competition was held over 2 days, Saturday the 15th for the group games and Sunday the 16th for the quarters, semis and Grand Final. An invitation from the organiser, Drew Tennant, was sent to the SFL to see if a team or any players would be interested in entering. The invitation was accepted, and turned out to be the perfect warm up for the SFL 5 team heading to Melbourne on the 21st.

The SFL Winter season concluded only 2 weeks ago and the Allstar team, which had recently been selected, was an obvious choice to enter the Curtin University Futsal competition. The team is currently training in preparation for a trip to Melbourne on the 21st September, to compete in the Futsal Oz Australian Futsal League Cup (FAFL). The tournament in Melbourne is the first of it’s kind, which offers a great opportunity for the best players in Australia to finally come together and compete against each other. The SFL 5 have been selected to represent WA and their first outing together proved to be extremely successful.

The last SFL Allstar team that was put together was in 2011 and they were victorious against the Australian Vikings team, winning 5 – 0. This time they would be expected to play together for 6 games and take out a local competition.

The SFL 5 team conceded only 1 goal in their 3 group games on Saturday and scored 17. On the Sunday they started off very slowly which was a bit of a concern for the coach, Raffaele Capasso and Manager El Abrahams. After some motivating words to the players they quickly made it back on track and eventually cruised to a 4 – 1 victory over the Angry Birds in the Grand Final, who coincidently play by the name Avengers in the Futsal @ Scotch League run by the SFL on Wednesdays. The teams in the final stages all consisted of players currently competing in a SFL competition which showed how the SFL had developed a higher standard of Futsal and at the end of the day the other competitors, spectators and organisers were treated to an exhibition of how Futsal is played at a higher level, and that it does exist in WA within the State Futsal league.

The next outing for the SFL 5 will be on the weekend when they will have the full squad available in Melbourne. The travelling team list of players include:

Brad Kneebone – Fremantle Muita Calma
Rob Kostic – Calibre 12 Melville
Diego Garcia – Calibre 12 Melville
Luke Tidy (C) – Fremantle Muita Calma
Nestor Fonseca – Fremantle Muita Calma
Salman Alhammadi – Fremantle Muita Calma
Tiago Fracasso – Fremantle Muita Calma
Daniel Cappellaro – Fremantle Muita Calma
Saeed Danesh – Fremantle Muita Calma
Victor Brauner (C)- Scarborough Samba Boys
Leandro Paixao – Scarborough Samba Boys
Tiago Vieira Teixeira – Scarborough Samba Boys
Ciro Rinaldi Celulari – Scarborough Samba Boys

Raffaele Capasso – Coach
El Abrahams – Manager

Standby:
Daniel Muzzarelli – South Fremantle MC
Victor Garzon – Belmont Nile Flow