The eagerly anticipated 2011 Mallorca Tournament kicked off on Pitch A with some familiar faces in eurofootballfives.com action as Askeaton FC of Ireland took on the CSF.

Askeaton FC are our most capped participants from Ireland making their 4th eurofootballfives appearance having played in the 2008 Prague Masters, 2009 and 2010 Algarve Opens. Their performances have been improving year on year as they seek their first tournament win most recently reaching the Algarve Open Cup Semi-Finals.

The CSF need no introduction and are the most travelled team in eurofootballfives.com history. They started their journey with us in Krakow 2007 and since then have followed it up with Prague 2007, Krakow 2008, Barcelona 2008, Algarve 2009, Amsterdam 2009, Valencia 2009 and Prague 2010. The Mallorca Tournament makes it appearance number 9 and in their 8 previous tournaments they have reached 5 Plate Finals, winning 4 of them and 3 of those were in the 2009 season (Algarve, Amsterdam & Valencia).

The two teams had met before in the 2009 Algarve Open when, under the names of Shooting Shamrocks and CSF Porto, the Irish came out on top 1-0. As with two years ago there was not much between these teams in the early stages and they reached half-time level at 0-0. In the second half Hugh O'Donnell opened the scoring and it was Ireland ahead again. When Michael Griffin popped in goal number two it was all over for the CSF as Askeaton made it two wins out of two against them. A great start for the Irish.

The final two teams to begin their challenge in Group A were Olimpico (a Spanish-based Ecuadorian team) against Midway Northerners. South American ex-pat teams have been successful in eurofootballfives competition before as recently as the 2010 Prague Trophy when Deportivo claimed the title. How would Olimpico fare?

Their opponents were the first of two teams from Midway FC making their debut in a eurofootballfives.com tournament. Under the name of Midway FC Northerners the English team more than held their own against the men wearing their national team shirts. It looked like Ecuador were playing West Ham – more than interesting if that match occurred in real-life. In this game though, we had our third consecutive goal-less first-half.

You needed to watch the second half in Group A to see goals though and again we got them – 2 in fact. The goals were shared amongst the sides as Cristian Cabeza scored for the home team and Michael Cullen opened Midway Northerners account. A good solid start for both teams.