It’s been in the news in Cumbria recently, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t happen often, and it’s a very popular game around the world, if not so much in England, the sport I’m talking about being Futsal, and the local connection being that former Blue, and recently appointed Workington Reds assistant manager Tony Elliott is the goalkeeping coach for the England team. Elliott at the end of last week and the start of this currently out in Latvia with the national squad as England take part in European qualifying for the 2012 FIFA Futsal World Cup.
England, as they are ranked way down in 91st place of the current 99 actively ranked sides in the world unsurprisingly having to take part in a round robin pre-qualifying competition simply to make it into the main round of qualifying in the European zone, the three Lions taking on host nation Latvia, Cyprus and San Marino with the group winners and runners up in the table moving on to the next stage in mid-December. England facing a difficult task though as Latvia are ranked 43rd and Cyprus 73rd, with San Marino being unranked at the moment as, with being a recently formed team, they have yet to play enough games.
The top five in the world Futsal rankings comes as no great shock with it being similar to the senior game of football, comprising as it does of Spain, Brazil, Italy, Russia and Portugal. Spain and Brazil sharing the last four World Cups between them, while the Spanish are also current European Futsal Champions, having won the competition on five of the seven occasions in which it has taken place. Brazil meanwhile winning the Futsal version of the Copa America a remarkable 19 times out of 21, oh, and they were runners-up in the two years they missed out as well.
So, what about the game itself, which is believed to have originated in Uruguay in 1930 after the home nation won the first ever football World Cup, well, as a basic description it’s five-a-side indoors. A few differences being that the maximum number of substitutes allowed is seven, with unlimited substitutions during the match, and that there are two penalty spots, the first one at six metres out being for a foul inside the box, while the second one at ten metres out is used when a player commits his team's sixth foul in the opposing team's half or in his own half although, when reading the rules, it looks like you need a degree in further mathematics to understand in which part of his own half it is.
Like football the game is played in two halves, lasting of 20 minutes each and the size of the playing surface can be anywhere between 25 and 42 metres in length and 18 and 25 metres in width. The goal though is slightly different to what you would term as a normal five-a-side goal as it is not far off square in shape at three metres wide and two metres high. The ball, which is kicked-in instead of thrown-in also being different as it is as size four, compared to size five in regular football, and has much more of a lower bounce, thus encouraging technique and close control with the ball also moving better when played on the floor.
So, given that the game is mainly played indoors and encourages technique and close control, you’d wonder why we aren’t playing more of it in this country, particularly at a younger age. Well, the game itself wasn’t really played until the 1990s in this country with the first proper Futsal league being organised in Lancashire in 2001. As far as the national team is concerned, England were one of the last major European nations to form a side, in 2003, with the FA Futsal League, the first official national league in England, starting up in February 2008.
But, as far as Tony Elliott is concerned it looks like a tough ask for England to even make it through the pre-qualification programme, with the FA website records going back to October 2006 and showing us as having an international record of W8 D4 L42 over the course of 54 games, although at least we have improved in the last 20 matches to go W7 D2 L11 as opposed to W1 D2 L31 in the first 34 games. The bottom line seemingly being though, like the senior version of the game, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.