(Editors note: Blog post updated to rerun correct photograph.)

Good soccer pictures are relatively easy to shoot with modern technology, but getting a great picture of the moment of a match is crucial and very difficult. To make it even more challenging, the important moment often changes during a match; in the end it is worthless having the first goal of one team if the other team wins 3-1. The crucial moment could be a decision made by a referee, a substituted player, an injury, an important save, but most of the time it’s the winning goal. Often the goal picture is not a fantastic image but photographers must have it, especially if its the winning goal of a final.

I was assigned as an editor to lead the Reuters News Pictures team covering the 2007 Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Finals . The tournament took place in July in four countries: Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. My current job is running the global pictures desk so I was very happy to return to the field for a couple of weeks.

Lots of hard work and traveling was involved to meet our simple goal of getting as many Reuters pictures published in newspapers and on Web sites around the world. Our target is to constantly produce eye catching images, providing all important news moments of a game and doing it faster than the competition.

We were lucky to have excellent local staff and stringers wherever we went: Kham in Hanoi, Zainal Halim and Bazuki Muhammad in Kuala Lumpur, the Queen of Indonesia Enny Nuraheni in Jakarta and Adrees Latif in Thailand.

July 29, the final match at Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Jakarta. “Lions of the Two Rivers” (Iraq) were playing their first Asian Cup final against three times winner “The Falcons” (Saudi Arabia). We had a meeting in the early afternoon with all photographers, editors and processors a full team. It was an interesting mixture of those with a lot of sport experience and those who were participating in their first big final.

Precise planning by Chief Photographer Asia Russell Boyce made sure everybody understood their job and our back up plan in case anything went wrong, and another plan in case that all went wrong too.

A couple of hours later the match started. The photographers were in place and stringer Dadang Tri managed to bypass heavy security around the Iraq fans by borrowing a uniform from a soft drink salesman to take pictures of fans in the stands. My heart, like that of the rest of the 60,000 strong audience, was with Iraq; at last something to celebrate.

Fast action images from all photographers in the first minutes of the game and we were done with the action (unless of course we got a real stunner). It was the winning goal and cup picture that mattered now. A few panicked minutes wrestling technical difficulties into submission, everything started to run smoothly and the pictures were dropping into our edit suite. The processors fingers tapping efficiently on the keyboards, sending fast, accurately captioned, well shot and well edited pictures to our worldwide clients. In the back of my mind I was praying please God no, not a penalty shoot out!

The highly motivated Tigers outplayed the Falcons, giving the fans a fantastic match with a hard fought battle for possession of the ball. Suddenly, in the 71^st minute, a header by Iraq captain Younis Mahmoud and Iraq scored their winning goal. Wild celebrations throughout the stadium and wilder celebrations in the media center. I took a quick look on the TV to make sure which player scored, expecting the first picture to land shortly.

After a few tense seconds we received the first picture of the goal. Within four minutes, the picture was sitting, processed and captioned, on clients’ picture desks. A couple of seconds later we received a picture of the same goal from a different angle, and then another and then another … It was amazing, every Reuters photographer had pictures of the winning goal shot from their position together with striking images of emotional celebrations. Rarely is a goal picture captured at the same moment by every photographer working at the game.

It was just fantastic. A great job done by all.