National champion, 2000, by Issa Tomh

From MemoryArchive

Who: Issa Tomh
What: Soccer championship
When: july 2000
Where: Rio de Janeiro

I started with 4 years old playing soccer with my friends in my backyard and soon soocer was part of my every day life. When I turned 7 i started to play for a team and things started to get more serious. Already at that age we dreamt of playing nationals, traveling abroad and making soccer not just a hobby, but our lifes. We lived in a very small town in the south of brazil close to argentina with only about 30 thousand people living there. When I turned 8 years old, the brazilian national soccer team won the world cup in USA, and from then on the dream of one day playing an important championship for a important team and maybe even see ourselves playing in the television was all we thinked about. When I turned 11 I was accepted into a semi professional team in the same small town in south brazil. we played regionally and all newpapers talked about our pottential. Soon we qualified for the state championship getting second palce loosing just against a once world champion team called gremio. But we got recognition. Newpapers would not stop talking about those guys from that came out of nothing and now are the second best in their state. We were envited to go to Rio de janeiro for the nationals and I remember being mesmorized and not believing such thing could be true. Rio de janeiro is a metropole, very big city and is about 30 hs away by bus. Since we did not hae airports in our small town, we just went by bus. That city is beautiful....does not matter where you are or who you are, you should visit that place is magical. Once there we were treated like stars, stayed in nice hotels. They were all great teams, but we were so commited to win that it happened. Television, newpapaper nationally were all mesmorized asking themselves how a small team with little infractructure and money won the nationals? i still cannot believe it.