Ashley Allanson

As previously reported on farsleyceltic.net, Celtic midfielder Ashley Allanson is jetting off to Kuala Lumpur in the next few days. Ashley has been named in Graeme Dell’s England Futsal squad for the KL World 5’s Futsal Tournament held in Malaysia.

The tournament is a prestigious one but it is not the actual Futsal World Cup. The Futsal World Cup takes place in October this year in Brazil. The qualifying rounds take at the end of February and for England in Hungary.

Farsleyceltic.net spoke to Ashley after Celtic’s 2-1 defeat to Kidderminster and it was evident from the first words that left his mouth, he is looking forward to his trip. Ashley is ecstatic that he has been picked for the tournament, he commented: “I’m absolutely delighted to be picked for my country. Making a full cap was a massive achievement but the KL Tournament is a bigger one. I want to go over there and do well to put myself in contention for the World Cup Qualifiers.”

Ashley has been playing Futsal for a while now and he explained his path to Kuala Lumpur: “I played on a Sunday night in Hull where I live and then I was invited to play for a team. I played originally for a bit of fun but I did really well and the next thing I knew was that I had been invited for trial with England. So I went down for a training day with the England Futsal squad - I must have done okay because I got a phone call the following week to say I was in the England squad for the game against Georgia. I went to Georgia and that was a fantastic experience.”

Ashley though is not confident of glory in the Far East, he said: “We going to be struggling to be fair. We play Argentina in the first game and they are the third best in the world and we’re the 119 th. It’s going to be difficult, we have only won one game in four years and that was the last game I played in against Greece.”

Are interested in getting involved in Futsal and following in Ashley’s footsteps? A link that may useful is http://www.futsal-leeds.org.