Friday Night Sights

Now that the dust has well and truly settled on the IAS ACTIVE Challenge’s industry-only five-a-side football tournament at The Cage, which was organised by Marketing – it’s time to take a moment and remember what was good, bad and ugly about it.



In the end, TBWA are the champs but there are no chumps in this tournament as it was all done for charity, meaning we raised money for a scholarship fund to sponsor university level marketing students in Singapore.



When you think of the word ‘charity’ a few things may come to mind.

1) NKF
2) An act of kindness on a fellow human being.
3) Groups of highly competitive and advertising industry blooded males donating money to kick each other until a winner is found.

We picked the third option.

So I can really only comment on the things I saw from my scorers position on Pitch 1 and that means I did miss out on watching a couple of (by all accounts) competitive teams going at it – The Euro Stars team was mentioned to me a couple of times.

Back on pitch 1, after hours of round robin play it was clear that DDB Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi were the teams to beat as both squads easily made it through to the semi-finals – and playing good football along the way as well (one touch stuff from DDB at times!). If you want to find out more about the actual results you can check out that story here.

As for this blog post, it’s simply my observations and I hope you will share some of yours with me.



The Good:
• $50,000 was raised!

• Good vocal support (Publicis comes to mind with all the banners and cheerleaders, not to mention the mini-buses, packed dinners, and didn’t they bring their own booze as well?

• Entertaining matches – wouldn’t have expected any less from a bunch of creatives though!
• Competitive spirit was alive and kicking (pun intended) – two players come to mind, such as Stephen Mangham and Jeffrey Seah.

• Classy goals – Saatchis get my vote on this one, with Strand (I think his name is Felix) the man scoring a few crackers, not to mention bagging a hat-trick. Actually the Saatchis team had more than a few flair players, too bad they couldn’t convert a single penalty in the Finals.

The Bad:
• Apart from Saatchi’s goalkeeper who was rightly dubbed The 1, and of course TBWA’s goalkeeper as well, who I will call The Wall (actually his name is Alex) – the goalkeeping throughout the tournament was pretty darn poor.

• Where’s the controversy? All football tournaments have some and surely someone must have spotted something? I was too busy trying to get the scores right!

• $5 beers although not as bad as when I went to watch the Contender where a can of Tiger set me back $10.



The Surprising:
• I have to give credit where credit is due – when I saw Richard Bleasdale pull on the DDB jersey I wasn’t expecting to see him terrorise the opposition but he certainly did!

• James Yip actually managed to keep his composure and kick the ball during the opening ceremony after his previous attempt resulted in an ‘air shot’ and sent his leather shoe goal bound – well done James.

• Tempers remained fairly calm on Pitch 1 but I heard it was a different story on Pitch 2.


Till next year then...