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State's first professional futsal match draws crowd of 2,100

02/08/2016, 5:30pm CST
By ERIC ANDERSON
Wisconsin Sports Group logo

A crowd of 2,100 turned out to watch the Wisconsin Sports Group All-Stars surge past Michigan side ABK 12-3 on Saturday night at Milwaukee Pius High School in the first professional futsal match played in Wisconsin. (Highlights below)

"It mirrored what a professional futsal environment would look like, the way the game was staged and all the off-court activities that were going on," said Mark Litton (Racine St. Catherine's/UW-Parkside), who coached the WSG All-Stars along with former U.S. futsal national team player David Moxom. "It was a great environment. Obviously, we entertained them with the game."

U.S. futsal national team coach Keith Tozer is the president and CEO of WSG and is the commissioner of the Professional Futsal League, which will start its inaugural season in 2017. The upstart league got a huge boost last week as Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban purchased a principal ownership in the PFL.

Saturday's exhibition match served two purposes, Litton said.

"Keith and I are both here locally, we have the Wisconsin Sports Group, we have a futsal academy, we have a futsal league, so it was something we really wanted to do to promote the sport," said Litton, who has been the U.S. futsal national team goalkeeper coach under Tozer since 2008.

"But we also wanted to kind of test the waters and see how well it would be received. PFL is planning to have two divisions, a Premier Division and a First Division (which will be a regional league). You never know about Milwaukee, there's chatter about some interest about bringing a team here. Whether or not that will come to fruition right off the bat, I don't know."

Saturday's match was tight early, but Litton and Moxom made an important change midway through the first half. They paired former Milwaukee Wave players Hewerton and Chico with Daniel Mattos and Ricardinho, who play together with the Wave's Major Arena Soccer League rival Detroit Waza Flo, on an all-Brazilian line.

"ABK, they're very disciplined, all of the guys who play on that team are entrenched in the futsal environment. ... We were pretty evenly matched through probably the first half of the first half. But we just completely turned the course of the game by putting that line together," said Litton, whose team opened up a 7-2 halftime lead.

"No disrespect to ABK, but that line was destroying them. They couldn't contain them and we started to run away with the game. That line looked like the highest level of futsal, how they moved, how they played – some of the goals they scored were absolutely fantastic. The crowd loved it."

Litton's highest praise went to Ricardinho, who has nine goals and nine assists in 15 appearances for Detroit this season.

"He was just magic on the ball," Litton said. "If you saw him before he touched the ball, you'd think, 'Who is this young, skinny kid?' But then once he had the ball at his feet, the kid was just pure magic."

Philip Suprise (Milwaukee Pius), Alex Tozer (Whitefish Bay Dominican), Diego Campos (Milwaukee Hamilton/Concordia) and Erik Boese (Wisconsin Lutheran/UW-Superior) were among the local products on the WSG All-Star roster.

Also playing for the All-Stars was Diego Bobadilla, a former ABK player who traveled with Keith Tozer, Litton and the U.S. futsal national team to Croatia from Jan. 22 to Feb. 2 and is set to play outdoors with the Croatian Eagles in the Premier League of America this summer. On the other side, ABK defender Jessie Zamudio and forward Alex Mendez also were on the recent trip to Croatia with the national team.

Suprise plays for the Wave and has earned two call-ups to the U.S. futsal national team. The WSG All-Stars had five players from the MASL's Cedar Rapids Rampage in Hewerton, Alex Tozer, Bobadilla, Gordy Gurson and Alfee Robbins, a former futsal national team player for his native England.

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