When numbers don't matter but heart does.

Day Three: Pyeong Taek, Korea.
Temperature: 0°C

Coming into the third day of our APAC campaign has been an eye-opener in many ways.

Firstly, we learnt that travelling in Korea without the basic knowledge of its language can be a real pain when it comes to ordering food.
Gosh.
Seriously, it takes us tremendous amount of energy and creativity just to get our message across.
It's been fun though and the people here are really friendly too, so that really helped us to get by. :)

Secondly, APAC in Korea has been so well organized that it shocked all of us!
From the very accommodating hotel management, to our comfortable subsidized rooms, to the officiating of APAC 2009 and so on (will include photos when I'm back in Malaysia).
It's by far the most efficient and organized APAC I've been to.

Anyway, we finally played our first match against the Kamikaze-spirited Japanese last night.
We lost real bad.
What can we say, they were way better than us.
They were in a league of their own.

The score?

14-1.

Yes, we got thrashed.
Though it was an embarrassing scoreline to begin the campaign with, I believe we played the best we could and most importantly, we played according to the game plan.
Ok fine, maybe sometimes we got a little over our heads and played our own game but I think overall, we managed to keep our heads up in spite of the defeating 14-1 score.

I can give a hundred and one reasons why we lost and it may all come across as sheer excuses.
So, I'm not going to delve into that.
The fact still remains that we lost to a better team.
That's that.

We've got another 4 more games coming up and we are going to win it back.
Our next game will be against the host, Korea.
It will be a tough fight against the hardworking and physically fit Koreans.

Last night after the match, our coach, Denise, said that only in the last period did we really play all out.
"You guys played with heart".
I'm not sure if it hit the rest of the guys but it sure did hit me.

Though we may be a team that's few in numbers, we can still take ownership of what's arguably the greatest weapon any team could have -
Heart.

When the countable figure of numbers may seem impossible to go against all odds, the uncountable spirit and heart of a team will be the inner force that pushes the limit of reality, transforming the seemingly impossible to possible.

We need to have heart.

Yours truly,
Christopher Koh
26th March 2009, Wednesday
10.33am, Korea.