Dribbling to a new record

988 That was the magic number which put them into the Singapore Book of Records.

Yesterday morning, almost a thousand people took part in a mass football dribbling event on the pitch of Jalan Besar Stadium.

The goal? To dribble their balls continuously for three minutes in an unbroken line.

The event was to commemorate RHB Bank Singapore's 10th anniversary of partnership with Football Association of Singapore's (FAS) and the S.League.

Participants for the record-setting event comprised almost everyone in the football fraternity - S.League players, fans and 600 children, aged six to 12, from the FAS Junior Centres of Excellence.

At 9.50am, the air horn sounded and the conga line of blue shirts started moving on the pitch. Though slow, the players kept their balls in great dibbling form.

From high up in the air, it looked like the snake that was preloaded on old Nokia mobile phones, wending its way through the space on the green pitch.

One of the participants was 11-year-old C T Mani Lakshmanan, a Rivervale Primary School student.

He told this reporter he was excited about participating: "Even though I had to wake up early to get to the stadium, I was very excited the moment I went onto the pitch.

"I like it when FAS holds this sort of festival, it's just so fun."

This article was published on May 4 in The New Paper.

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