tournament. At the last minute one of the premier teams, Mixed Nuts,
informed the organizer, Jim, that they weren't coming to DC. So Jim
threw some players from his team, Mall Rats, into the mix plus a few
additions, like me, to create "Mall Rats NC". According to Jim, the
"NC" stands for Nut Crushers.
In traditional CCSL style, our 8:AM game got started about 8:20AM versus
the Hooligans (formerly Prism). This particular Saturday spring morning
was turning out to be a great day to play soccer. Mall Rats NC started
in their traditional Blue strip. Hooligans were green. Yours truly
opened the scoring within the first ten minutes :) Our defense lobbed a
ball high over their defenders so the goalie came out, but not quick
enough. The ball bounced, I heard the goalie say, "oh f*&^%" as I
lobbed it off the bounce over his head and into the goal. It turns out
that scoring early is not good for me because the during the rest of the
tournament I was constantly missing my first touch while thinking about
the second and third touch that would bring me into scoring position.
Luckily we had a good goalie and good possession and thusly the game
ended 1-0.
Our second game started around 12:30PM against an out-of-town "ringer"
team called the Pirates. They beat Booters FC in their first match 4-0
so we were looking at a hard match. The normal starting forward for
Mall Rats, Guy, opened the scoring about 20 minutes in off a hard hit
right footed half-volley to the far post. Nice goal. We looked good in
the beginning of the match, but they were in better shape for a double
header day and we started to wear out. By the end of the first half we
conceded two goals. The Pirates first goal I don't quite remember, but
I believe it was well worked and deserved. Their second goal came on a
counter attack after a failed Mall Rats corner kick. They ran it up the
side, put in a hard low cross, and our stopper at the time, Jim, put it
in our own net. He had to make a play on it because there was a Pirate
forward right behind him, and to be fair the ball took a bad bounce off
the lousy field right as he went to kick it. I had sprinted from one
end of the pitch to the other to cover that forward, but I didn't quite
reach him in time to call Jim off.
At half time, down only 2-1 we were optimistic for a comeback. Although
we didn't create many scoring chances in the second half, we kept them
out of the goal. Until near the end when their forward got away with
bringing the ball down with his hand and scoring. A couple of our guys
almost got thrown out of the game for arguing with the ref. The missed
hand ball call in the middle of a series of bad calls and bad
non-calls. Jim, being one of CCSL's premier refs, successfully kept a
lid on the dissent and reminded us all that reffing, bad or good, is
part of the game and something you have to be able to deal with and
still prevail if you want to be champions.
Overall, I had a good time. I did a lot of running, sometimes without
much purpose tactically, but I was using this opportunity to get in
shape and I'm sufficiently sore. Our third game and potential
championship games on Sunday were rained out. I believe Peter, George,
and Jess played three games. Our division was not set up for the
emergency late third game.
See you Sunday morning at the Marina!
Right on, nice post. The Goleros want you to repeat your goal-scoring performance!
ReplyDeleteBring that energy to our game on Sunday. As a team, we need to work on keeping our tempo up, making tactical runs off the ball, and playing to space.