Victorious U19 Boys

Last second winner for our U-19 Boys Haileybury Astana Football team

In the match Haileybury Astana against Astana Garden School on May 28th, our U19 team was able to come out victorious. In an incredibly demanding game our students were able to demonstrate their dedicated and strong mindset when pursuing victory. 

Since the COASH competition has come to an end this academic year and with IGCSE as well as end of year exams happening, it was an amazing to see a range of students eager to play. With well-being at the core of our last weeks topics, giving our students the opportunity to balance out the stress through fun and competition, is in sync with the Schools Strategic objectives. 

In an incedibly close match between Haileybury Astana and Astana Garden School our U19 demonstrated resilience, as they were able to turn an 1:2 to a 4:3 game. With an amazing performance from everyone on the team, they demonstrated important skills for life, such as teamwork and continue with their head held high. In addition to it being a difficult game, the weather, which settled at around 30˚C pure sunshine, made fighting back very difficult. After it being 3:3 for quite some time one of our players, Karim, who also plays for FC Astana, was able to get a penalty in the last remaining seconds. He converted the penalty, his second of the game, leading the U19 boys to victory with seconds remaining. We are very proud of our boys team. 

At Haileybury we aim to give ours students a balance between their studies and mental and physical well-being. We hope to see our U19 team back on the pitch team soon.

We also want to show appreciation to Mr Damir Sartayev who coaches the boys team amazingly. 

When asking members of the team about the game they all showed their appreciation of one another. Dimash, our year 13 player and therefore oldest current member of the team, told us that even though he was not totally pleased with his own performance, he was praising others for their resilience of dealing with the mental and physical challenges presented by the weather in addition to the fact that it had been their first game on the big pitch since futsal season ended. 

Coach Damir was also proud of his teams fighting power, that even though the heat was difficult to deal with, our students fought hard and were able to turn the game and win it.