NAIROBI, Kenya, June 14- Standard Chartered Trophy World Champions Capital FM football team have their eyes set on a second title this year as the Lenovo/Intel five-a-side tournament goes down this weekend at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies.
The Best Mix of Music team which became the first African side to win the Standard Chartered Trophy Final at Anfield Stadium, home of EPL club Liverpool FC, have been drawn in a tough Group C of the one-day tournament that has brought together 20 teams.
Capital FM will square it out with hosts Lenovo, Specicom, Office Mart and Computer Planet, eying to top the Pool and make it to the knockout stages alongside the second placed.
“We thank Lenovo and other corporate companies for such initiatives to organize tournaments and help us grow as a team. Such tournaments will help us continually improve and again we have a chance to show that we are the best,” team manager, Duncan Kikata said.
“We have seen the pooling and we expect it tough. We know every team is going to go all out on us but we have been training hard and we are ready for the tournament. We want to win, that’s the bottom line,” Kikata added.
A total of 20 teams have confirmed participation in the inaugural tournament with eight media teams participating.
The Capital FM team, which has had a tremendous season so far, will be led by skipper Lassie Attrash, all-time top scorer Solomon Okeyo, Richard Litunya, Timothy Olobulu, Shaffi Soud, Jeffrey Oyoo, Ali Athman, Joe Miano, David Muba and Alex Isaboke.
Pool D is the tournament’s group of death as it comprises of Radio Africa, Standard Group, national broadcaster KBC, Tricontinental Limited and Hyper Distributors.
Two media teams, Nation Media Group and SuperSport will fight off for honors from Group A and will face opposition from Computec, Copy Cat and Sight ‘n’ Sound.
Royal Media Services and Mediamax will headline Group B with Trans Business Managemnt, Crescent and RDD making up the five teams.
Organizers are yet to disclose the prize money but Lenovo boss David Caleb has disclosed the company has set aside Sh5 million for the tournament.
“This is one way for us to interact with our partners and customers. We wanted to do something different and we know that sport has power of uniting people and we decided to go this way. We are looking forward to it and hopefully do more,” Caleb said.
Joy Ochuka, the Lenovo Marketing Manager has disclosed winners will walk away with Lenovo give-aways including laptops and smart phones.
“We are looking forward to a great day on Saturday and very good competition from all the teams, but above all, we want to help foster friendship between us and our consumers and media partners,” She noted.