IHG Water Polo Finals by Sean Lim

Waterpolo v Hall 3 (Finals)
WIN 19-2

Wednesday, 19 February 2014

SRC SWIMMING POOL, NTU

In the end it was all a bit of an anti-climax. Like Captain Francis Koh said, this was a win that was 4 years in the making, but seeing it play out as it did, sometimes we do wonder what the fuss was all about.

As it turns out, Hall 3 had a serious labour crunch coming into this final. Unlike our team, Hall 3 really only had 9 players in their entire team, and on that day, 3 of them could not have make it. The end result was what we saw: a Hall 3 team that decided it would rather take an understrength, understaffed lineup to face the "firing squad", as they termed us, than to concede the final in a walkover.

So in light of this revelation, I guess it is fair to say, however grudgingly, that Hall 3 deserves a round of applause for even turning up for the first whistle. After our earlier clash in the preliminaries, they knew fully well this was as lost a cause as it could possibly be. But still they turned up anyway, facing the prospect of being on the wrong end of the spanking of a lifetime.

As JK Rowling puts it so aptly in The Deathly Hallows, "This cold-blooded walk to his own destruction would require a different kind of bravery."

In such circumstances, the match becomes a mere afterthought; whatever happened before, and after, as I found out on hindsight, eclipsed it so thoroughly. Against opponents in such dire straits, it really doesn't matter how many goals Toh zy scores, or how many saves Kenryu made.

As a matter of fact, it was probably less than the number of fingers on my hand, which is really sad, isn't it? Our graduating seniors have been looking forward to this day for 4 years, yet they were denied the opportunity to really immerse in the atmosphere of winning a final, to get the feeling that they really deserved this win. The same goes for the other freshmen players like Myran, Yuan Song and Vinoth. We created a video to generate hype, getting our residents down to share in the excitement of playing in a final. Well, whoever was watching a waterpolo game for the first time would not be in a hurry to watch another. Hall 3 never even stood a chance of achieving an underdog win, playing shorthanded for the whole game with absolutely no substitutes.

A situation where no one walked out a winner.

Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we see the things we want and expect to see. We then let our biases and emotions take over, saying and doing things that we ruefully regret later on. It is usually prudent to understand the whole picture before jumping to any hasty conclusions, causing misunderstandings when the whole debacle could have so easily been avoided.

So while we take pride in our waterpolo team's win, let us also recognise that Hall 3 did what they did because they had no other options. Playing with 6 was not a malicious act to taint our victory, but rather a valiant last stand against all odds. I say this not with the intent of being politically correct (all of you should know by now that's not high on my list of priorities), but with the hope that upon reflection, cool heads, rationality and empathy will prevail.

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