Thursday, January 23, 2003

Disaster Strikes


Sometimes in soccer you get to do the whipping, other times you get whipped. Well tuesday my men's team got WHIPPED. 11-0 to be exact. Yes you read correctly. No, we were not short players. No, we did'nt play the Brazilian national team. We just played awful. At half time, we were down 5-0. We've been there before as a team and have come back. So no one was too worried. By mid-second half, we began to realize and accept that we just could'nt buy a goal that night. For any of my teammates that may find their way to this page, let me break down what exactly went wrong. First off let me state that the score was of NO fault of our goal keeper Steve. He played great actually, making some incredible saves. It was our lack of defending and player marking that got us in trouble. The week before we had played a weaker team. We were able to run the field at our own pace and score on odd man rushes. Not this time. Often caught with only two defenders, we waited for the quick turn over to spring a forward for a fast break. This didnt work because the other team had plenty of speed and was able to get a third defender back every time to help kill our attacks. There was no build up in midfield and no combination passing in our attacking third. Our midfielders wanted to attack, became tired and were unable to defend effectivly. Their speedy forwards and midfielders were able to bring the ball up the field, almost unpressured for the most part and find an open forward making a run downfield. Frustration began to set in and aggressive ball tackling turned into just plain player tackling as our defenders tripped and drug down their forwards. This resulted in two penatly shots and 2 goals for them. As we fell behind in the score, all patience was lost. Normally we are a team that controls the ball. Cycling it around our defenders, through midfield and to the forwards to finish. On this night, it was the oppisote. We resorted to send repeated long balls up the field in hopes of getting a lucky shot. We probably connected no more than 4 consecutive passes and forced or hurried 80% of our shots on goal. This resulted in lots of easy saves for their keeper. A long story short, we just fell apart. It looks like it will take at least one more season for our team to be ready to take the tittle. We will now play in the third place match in the play-offs. Bummer.

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