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Post by Blade on Mar 21, 2009 4:01:15 GMT
I'm in a sorrowful mood so gather round, someone serve me up some rounds and I'll tell you a sad tale of my defeat in soccer tonight...It was a heartbreaker...
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Post by Sir Imperium on Mar 21, 2009 20:45:08 GMT
heh, hope u haven't blown promotion like my team has at hockey.
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Post by Blade on Mar 21, 2009 23:49:47 GMT
well the first couple of games don't matter, it's a pretty casual city league, just 4 games kinda for 'warmups' i guess, though it does help your seeding in the tournament I guess, but everyone makes it into the tournament and 4 tournament games tops, so a total of a 8 weeks 8 games.
So the story goes something like this...The game starts and our goalie is still off paintballing...won't be there for another 10 minutes. I'm the only one that's had any decent experience at goalie so I get stuck in goal. keep in mind I've been away from any serious game of soccer for like 5 years so I'm a bit rusty.
The first play of the game I make a stupid mistake, I've got a slow roller shot coming at me, but I wasn't paying attention to where I was at and accidentally stepped out of the box with the ball in my hand. Direct free kick coming but my defense takes care of it for me so I'm fine.
Couple more plays go by with nothing really happening, then I get caught off guard by another roller and I couldn't collapse on top of it fast enough and it gets underneath me. 1-0. I stop the next one that's going for the far post and then johnny shows up, thank goodness so they switch me out.
Later they end up putting me back in on right forward. Now, I'm not the forward type, I don't really have any moves, I'm typically midfielder or defense material but our defense is pretty tight so what the hey you know? Also, we're playing pretty crappy honestly and the other team is moving the ball pretty well. We're bunching up too much basically, and playing too much to one side as well. Still, we've never played together before so it's a bit understandable.
What hurt was I had an open shot towards the end of the first half, Someone on our team had taken a shot and the goalie blocked it but it bounced back in front of the goal and I beat everyone to it, I lined up for the shot to put away hard...and I shanked it to the left! I was so pissed at myself, The goalie was out of position I HAD that one!
Anyhow, play continues, our goalie gets caught in a 1-1 and can't find an opening to stop the guy since it was picked up about midfield so 2-0 them. In the meantime I've had a couple more decent looks that I blew.
1st half ends and maybe about 10 minutes into the second half things turn a bit ugly. One of the other players is playing our left forward a little too closely and he keeps running into her...she gets up and pushes him pretty hard and yells at him to back the F* off...I'm a little worried because in a city league that's a card, but the ref is cool with it I guess (probably because she's a girl and maybe because she might have something of I point I don't know) anyhow one of their players starts mouthing off to our girl, then one of our players starts mouthing off to him...I'm worried a fight's about to break out on the field, or even that the ref is about to start throwing out cards. The other team however isn't happy about their player mouthing off either so they immediately pull him and bench him for the rest of the game. We're playing a heck of a lot better during the second half, but the ref keeps jipping me because the other team is playing the offsides trap. I made sure a number of times not to leave until my teammate kicked the ball but they keep telling me I'm offsides...
I really don't think the refs know what they're talking about on those, but meh, i can live with it. There were a lot of poor reffing calls. They repeatedly called fouls when the moment was clearly in our favor. One time the girl on the left managed to get open in the corner and I was set up perfectly for her to give me a cross only to have the ref bring the ball back because one of the other teams players fouled one of ours...I was so pissed at losing that momentum...anyhow, I think our team was getting a bit frustrated and started playing a bit rough so our right forward gets a yellow card for playing a guy a bit too aggressively in the corner...Somewhere in all that the other team manages to score another goal. Our goalie was great, making some amazing saves but they just had too many shots on goal...Anyhow essentially the last major play of the game was a heartbreaker for me.
Because they were playing the offsides trap me and the girl on the left are running in lockstep it's a 2 on 3...I drop back a couple of steps for her to feed me the ball which stops the defenders and I manage to put the ball perfectly between the two defenders guarding me, as good of a give and go as you could ask for...she's got the corner with just her and the goalie, she puts it high...it's going perfectly...then clips the underside of the crossbar and bounces down. The problem is the goal we were shooting on had a bent crossbar...all the other goals on the fields we were playing on were fine...If we'd been shooting on any other goal it would've been in. I'm still bitter about it because everything about that play was about as perfect as we could have asked for.
Anyhow, long story short, I think they played a lot better than our team and deserved to win, but I also think the score should have been a lot closer more like 3-2...oh well though, it was a good game and our first time together as a team so I think we'll do a lot better in the future...oh yeah, and my friend who played high school ball with me was off on a camping trip and he's amazing and he'll be back for this friday's game so we'll see what happens next week. Stay tuned...
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Post by Blade on Mar 28, 2009 7:57:33 GMT
And now for round two...
so the game was a little lopsided...since it's a co-ed league you have to have at least 3 girls on the field at all times, otherwise you have to play 1 player down for every girl missing...so they were missing 1 girl and were only allowed to play with 9 players instead of 11.
It ended up in a pretty big rout...actually they played pretty well for being 2 down. So I took some time to practice early today to make sure my shots were on this time...and they weren't too bad they just kept missing outside left. So the game started pretty quick...I almost had to keep again, but luckily our keeper showed up. Sat out for the first 10 minutes or so then our left forward started getting tired so I subbed in. We were able to get the corner practically every time since they were playing down so I was able to get to the corner and then cut towards the center and our center mid was coming in quick so I placed it for him right in the center and he just nailed it middle high 1-0. Their goalie kept coming out way too far but we were never able to capitalize on it. The refs were still calling the offsides calls really badly. They keep calling it way after the ball is kicked because I know I made sure one time I had two steps after our guy kicked it before I moved, but I got such a good jump on the defender that I guess they figured I had to have been offsides. Even in the second half our guy got called for being offsides when we were on our own side of the field! I was so pissed at that call. It was a good friend of mine so I talked to him about it later, because I was pretty sure I had been watching him to see if he was onsides and he said the exact same thing. The stupid thing is that the ref said that his feet were on our half but his body wasn't...and I'm pretty sure according to the laws of physics..that's not possible.
Anyhow the half ended with us only up 1-0. Partway through the second half though they switched their goalie out with another guy because their first goalie was pretty quick so I figure they were looking for some more offense. Bad move on their part though because their goalie never came up when he needed to. Anyhow, we stomped on them. The left side was just open as could be. I could get past the left defender at will and there was no way he could catch up, but my shots just kept missing to the left off the left post. Gonna take some more practice next week to make sure my shots are on. Our Center Mid pulled off a hat trick though, and we ended the game 4-0. All in all a pretty good game. Still had some problems with controlling the ball and switching fields but we'll work on that.
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Post by Blade on Apr 6, 2009 16:03:39 GMT
So, the updated status for round three...All in all this was a very well played game on our part, not much to complain about this game except for the fact that none of our shots would land...
So we arrived at the field a bit early to practice our shots and to get our goalkeeper warmed up, but it seems that the park doesn't open til 6 anyways and our game was at 6:15 so we didn't get too much time in. The conditions weren't that great anyways, There was a pretty fierce wind blowing in across the field, luckily it wasn't going length wise...I would've hated playing into the wind, but it still caused all of our shots to drift. Anyhow the game started out alright though they had 2 of their girls on defense which personally I didn't think was very smart but hey, whatever. I guess our team might just be lucky because the girls we've got playing on our team are very good and prefer to be up forward (where they do a great job) Anyhow things started out pretty normal. My friend cameron was finally playing at his level which was good. Last week he wasn't on his game but this week he was great. He's a midfielder and he's got great ball control and has a good grasp on what's happening on the field. He really set up the game by moving the ball around where it was needed.
We scored about 20 minutes in which was a good start. I was breaking on the left but got trapped by 2 defenders and fed it back into the middle to Cameron who redirected it across to the other side where the other guy hammered it in from short.
The pace of the game was really great for us, I think we've finally found where we're at as a team. We controlled the ball really well. They had a really good team of forwards who were moving the ball around really well but they weren't getting the support they needed from their midfield and we were able to do really well at cutting off their angles and double teaming on them when we needed to. I think they only had 3 shots on goal the entire game. We on the other hand had to have had like 20-30 shots on goal and sadly enough only converted on one of them. I'm not sure what was up because their goal keeper was only fairly decent. We had so many shots that just barely went over the crossbar or just barely off to the side...I mean, just in the last 5 minutes alone there were 5 like that. We had a lot of chances to convert on corner kicks too...I had a cross come in straight at me, but I couldn't get into position to kick it and it caught me really high on my thigh...I tried to push the ball just by moving my leg but it went wide.
Anyhow the reffing again was sub par. We had them kick a ball back towards their guy and it went out of bounds and the ref called it their ball even though none of our guys were near it to touch it. I think he just got confused because there had been a substitution right before. Another time though their goalkeeper caught the ball back near the back line, then he carried the ball out of bounds...All our team was screaming at him that it was out and he's all like "It's not about where the keeper is at, it's where the ball is" And we kept telling him that didn't matter, that he'd carried himself and the ball out of bounds...(my friend almost got a yellow for that for arguing with the ref, even though my friend wasn't even yelling or anything, just explaining) The offsides calls were a lot better though this round so I was happy.
There was one scary moment towards the end...one of girls who was playing defense wasn't playing the offsides trap the way she should have. ( I was back playing sweeper by this point and my friend cameron was playing stopper so that our previous stopper could try and convert some goals) Anyhow, my friend and I were watching the ball and saw all their guys start to break to go past us so we immediately stopped to pull the offsides trap...we thought we had them cold since they were way behind us but the girl didn't play the trap and chose to mark her man even with us yelling to push up. Anyhow, it ended up in a 3 on 1 situation with our goalkeeper...we were all freaking out because despite dominating the game we were only up by a goal and hand't been able to convert...luckily johnny was the man and came up with the save despite the situation and that was their only real scoring threat the entire game.
All in all a great game, so far we're 2-1 but we're 2-0 in our bracket so if we win this next game we'll have the number 1 seed for our bracket going into the tournament...i really hope we get another crack at that team we played on our first game because I really want to beat them, especially that kid that was mouthing off. If we keeping the teamwork we had this game we should be able to do it
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