Fatima and its enduring tradition

Dec 05, 2009 Sports

Club esteem the Hockey Festival

Fatima, seated together at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall, enjoys a light moment before a veterans’ game yesterday afternoon. The club is the defending champion in that category and will look to add another accolade this year.

By Edison Jefford
With coolers stacked with ice and beverages on the bleachers of the Cliff Anderson Sport Hall, the conspicuous presence of the always-uniformed Fatima Hockey Club has become a dynamic feature of the International Hockey Festival.
It would be fair to conclude that the cultural aspect of the competition would not be intact without the overwhelming presence of the Trinidad and Tobago-based Hockey entity and two-time champions in the veterans’ tournament.
Kaieteur Sport sat down with Chairman of the club, Paul Pantin at the Sports Hall, and he told us that their presence in Guyana has to do with the durable friendships that they have managed to build over the years with local clubs. He said that the competition is secondary to the relationships they have built with clubs at the event. “We remain in contact via email and look forward to coming each year because we have forged a lot of close friendships here,” he noted.
The International Hockey Festival is the Guyana Hockey Board’s premier calendar event that attracts participation from as far as Canada. It is, however, more than just a paradigm tournament as the connotation ‘Festival’ suggests.
The event, which got underway Thursday evening and concludes tomorrow, has managed to build a reputation of immense social networking in a cultural atmosphere that produces many interesting off-court phenomena like Fatima.
“We plan this trip like three to four months in advance. It’s more like a social preparation phase for us because we put in for time off and holidays to come for the social aspects, so the hockey is like an excuse to come here,” Pantin joked.
He said that Guyanese sporting culture, however, never deters the club from their purpose that is to win the coveted veterans title.
Fatima placed second in 2006 while they won in a close game in 2007 before repeating the feat last year.
“It is our hope to bring it off again (winning the title). We have been playing well and it’s no secret that everybody loves to win.
We love the Chinese and Brazilian food here but in the end, we understand that we are here to win,” he said.
Pantin is of the judgment that it is the atmosphere of relaxation that they create with their socialisation processes that helps them approach each game less tense. In other words, the ‘liming’ for Fatima is a form of mental preparation.
“You can still play hard and also enjoy yourself in sport. We have been together for about 25 years. We went to school together; we lime together and so on; so our club foundation is very solid,” Pantin continued with this newspaper.
Fatima is a subsidiary of the larger Portuguese Club, which is an entity that is made up of mostly players from Portuguese ancestry. The club has heads of both the male and female divisions and “is still growing” according to Pantin.
The socially-enchanted Fatima focuses heavily on youth development as their means of a feeding programme for their senior divisions.
They even brought European Coaches to be part of their training processes in Trinidad and Tobago.