Canton Cup Preview

If I’ve discovered anything about the kids sports, I’ve discovered this…..I’m a little(!) obsessive about doing internet research of opponents and past opponents.  So, this post is a product of my obsession; a preview of the three games we have coming up this weekend in the tournament.  If we win our group, we get a fourth game, the final against the other group winner.

This tournament is huge…..775 teams are entered.  There are eight different divisions of U9 boys teams; we are placed in the 2nd best grouping.  I think we are a solid group on offense and defense but we don’t have a regular goalie who can make the difference in a game…..and hope that doesn’t come back to bite us this weekend.

Anyway, on to the scouting report: 

Michigan Tigers – Our first opponent.  Undefeated in their spring league and won a tournament in Ohio a few weeks back.  Look to be pretty formidable.  Trying to find a bright side, they didn’t play in the highest grouping in that tournament (out of 3, they choose the middle).  I think this game will be our toughest.  Can’t seem to find any common opponents to compare against….

Carpathia Kickers – Our second opponent.  Google stalking, I think, shows that they aren’t even the best U9 team at their club…..I’m guessing this isn’t going to bode well for them against us, since we are the best U9’s in our club and draw from a larger area.  They play the Tigers Friday night and then play us (our first game) Saturday morning, so, we should have an idea of where things stand after that first game.

Chill – The other travel team from Lansing…..there aren’t a lot of intra-club games because we are in different leagues throughout Michigan.  I’m looking forward to this game, the other parents are looking forward to it, and I think by the time we get to this game on Saturday afternoon the boys will be pretty amped up for it as well.  Just have a hard time seeing us lose this game…..they haven’t been playing the same level of competition as us.  Hope that I’m not proven wrong here….

The goal

You may want to go watch this again before you read on.

This may be my favorite 13 seconds of video ever…..I realize now I’ve watched it at least 50 times and figured if I’ve watched it that many times I should write something more about it.  I guess the bottom line is I’m so happy for Christopher that he was able to do this…and he really did something that not many of his teammates could do to make it happen. 

The beginning:  You can hear me yelling to Matthew to come take the kick…..I thought the ref did a great job this game, but, I’m surprised he let our player kick the ball like this without letting the other team get set.  That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but, in our other games the refs would have a stoppage here and let everyone get organized.  I’ve always asked our forwards and midfielders to get forward to make sure we had a big presence around the goal and had the best foot on the defense do the kick.  So that’s why I’m shouting that….

But hats off to Daniel, who put the ball in play as soon as he could and played it nicely in front of Christopher.

The middle:  The big guy had to get moving to catch up with the ball…there’s a lot of ground to cover here.  But his kick, his left-footed kick, that’s a thing of beauty.  He swings around to line up, he plants that right foot just right, and he powers through it. 

All this year, every practice, we’ve played ‘nets’….the boys have to kick the ball and score a goal AND it has to hit the back of the net first (can’t touch the ground).  We start close and move back for each round.  The challenge is that we’ve been doing it left-footed at every practice too, and by the end of they year there’s been a lot of improvement.  Cpher may not have the ‘soccer’ kick; he’s never learned to hit it with the side of his foot consistently, but, when he toes it, he can really hit it, and he can do it very well both right and left.  One other player on the team has leftie goals…Cpher is the 2nd.

It’s a good thing he hit it hard….he sent it right at the goalie.

The end:  I absolutely love the little raise of his hands before he turns around and runs back.  You can’t hear it on the tape, but his teammates on the bench went nuts…that he scored, that he scored left-footed, that he scored with such a great shot left-footed.  My second favorite part in all of this?  These pictures:

We’ve told Matthew, that, in the future, you may not want to chest bump someone who outweighs you by almost fifty pounds and is coming full speed towards you; heck, I’m not even sure Christopher knew that’s what Matthew wanted to do.  You can see that Matthew bounced right off of his brother like he was a bug…..

After the goal (it’s not on the video), one of the other parents, who knew that this was the last soccer game for Cpher, called over to me and said “That's how you go out on top!”.

Spring Soccer – The End

Someone must like me….after a spring of rain, cold, and hail(!), this weekend turns out gorgeous and today’s game is played under bright sunny skies with a temperature in the low 80’s.  That same someone must not like Suzanne, who has quite the sunburn from yesterday’s short exposure to the sun at the Arts Festival.

Anyway, my post-game speech on Saturday night was simple “Their coach said they were lucky, you guys play like that you are going to win nine times out of ten, and you all better play like that tomorrow, because I want to end my coaching career on a high note!”.  No pressure, right?

There’s a lot of pictures below (that’s a good thing)….and I’m not even going to re-post here all of the Christopher Goal pictures.

The first fifteen minutes of this game was a microcosm of how the whole season had been…..we had a ton of chances and couldn’t score.  Matthew was his usual aggressive self; he was taking it to the other team at every moment.

….and early in the game he was rewarded with this breakaway….and pushed the ball just wide of the goal.  In the first ten minutes we had three breakaways, completely missed the net on two and put one off the post on the third.  Of course, they score right after that, and we’re down 1-0.

 

 

I had Matthew and Christopher together in the same grouping of players for almost the entire game….just figured it was the last time they would probably play soccer together and I wanted it that way.

At halftime we were tied 1-1.  Told the kids to keep doing what we were doing, the goals would come.  And we poured in four  more in the second half.

 

You wouldn’t have known it was the last of the six games this weekend…he hustled his little butt off. 

 

And these two photos are a Matthew special…..pulling the ball out of mid-air…even though I bet he was hoping it would go forward but instead it went almost straight up if not a little backwards. I’m pretty sure he got control of this ball and headed back forward though…

These two pictures were after the goal and I think literally the were the last time Cpher touched the ball in the game since he got a little hurt here somewhere and I pulled him out right after this.  You can see the ball in between him and the other player as he’s about to clear it out of our zone in the first photo (it’s bouncing in…this was a tough thing and I was worried that he would miss it).  In the second you can see the other player deciding that he didn’t want Cpher to bury the ball in his face or the front part of his boyd and has turned to avoid that; Cpher has successfully booted the ball back up field.

 

I challenged the kids at the beginning of the game…I asked “who hasn’t scored a goal?”  Five raised their hands, and two, Cpher and one other got them this game.  I put two others on as forwards late in the game and told the other three kids out there that they were to try and help those two get goals (one kid had two huge open chances and missed the net twice….Aaagh!).  But Matthew was the other kid who hadn’t scored, and I put him on with about two minutes left (it wasn’t his time) to try and get that goal and I told him to be selfish and go for it. 

He’s a good kid….this last picture he’s breaking in, and he has the angle (you can’t see it here) and was going to get by the defensive guy…..but when the other defensive guy came over to guard him he did the right thing, he passed the ball over and gave his teammate the better chance. 

TNT Spring Futbol – Game 4

The team was back at it Sunday morning trying to shake off the loss from Saturday.  Both Saturday’s game, and this one, were against the other teams that were undefeated in our division.

The team, again, seemed to come out a little flat and gave up a goal early to go down 1-0.  The goal wasn’t a cheapie, their guy rocketed it in from the far right….it was a heck of a goal.

 

But, we came back to tie it, and then pull ahead 2-1.  Matthew again spent a lot of time on defense and as I was talking with the coach after the game about a few other things, he mentioned how he’s going to have Matthew back there more.  Not so much because Matthew is good at it, but, on our team, we have a lot of quick, small, darting kids, and Matthew, while he can do that, is one of the few kids who can hold up physically back there (especially on corner kicks).

 

Suzanne and I were talking about how the “scoring all the time” Matthew seems to have disappeared and been replaced by the “passing” Matthew.  And I guess we wish he were a little more selfish (Matthew would never have butted in to steal a goal from a teammate like what happened to him on Friday night).  But the coach mentioned that one of the reasons he has Matthew on defense is that he is really good at vision and passing and creating opportunities for our offense by pulling balls out of the air and getting them back forward.  They tied it 2-2 in the second half, but, Matthew did just what I was talking about, pulled a ball out of the air at midfield and got it up-field and we scored the game-winner for a 3-2 win.  It was nice, after the goal the coach was shouting out to Matthew that goal was all about him setting us up…..

 

All that being said, this was not one of Matthew’s finest games….he seemed to focus too much on the ball and lose offensive players behind him at times.  His coach got on him more than once about hanging back and not being in position to support the offense (I think this is one of the reasons that the coach was pretty enthusiastic about the goal when he did do it….he’s normally really good at it, but, had seemed to not be all there today).  It was 5th game in a little under 80 hours…I’m inclined to let these lapses slide….and he came out like a ball of energy in the last game of the weekend four hours later….

This is the other Matthew advantage on defense; he has a big foot and can take these free kicks and get them up in the air and forward to his teammates.

 

Didn’t have many chances on offense today……that’s fine I guess.   They’ll come….

As always, the video machine was rolling, and there are a few highlights of Matthew to be found…….

He’s really good/aggressive with his head right now….this video specifically shows a corner kick coming in and going right back out as he heads it out of our end. 

And this one shows a corner kick as well…..Matthew I guess does an ok job here, he forces the guy into a pass but it would have been better if the guy never made the pass at all.  That turns into a break for us, and then they are coming back the other way until you get to the picture above, where Matthew stops the ball and moves it back forward to the offense, and we score from there.

Thirteen pictures of pure happiness……

Wait, what was that quote?  “….hope he can pull it together for a highlight or two before the end.  I certainly root for it.”

With about 10 minutes left in the game, Christopher closes out his last game of competitive soccer with one of the better goals we’ve seen all year, an absolute monster of a left-footed(!) blast on a breakaway. 

The video can be found if you click on the photo below:

Suzanne held down the button on the camera and got all of the action in a series of photos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on the game in a later post….

Spring Soccer – Game 7

The take away from this game is during the handshakes at the end……say good game to the team, and get to the other coach, and he says “We were lucky”.

We lost 1-0.  And unlike earlier this year when we lost to this outfit 4-0 and I couldn’t figure out what to tell the boys to turn things around, this time, I can accept that 1-0 result since we left it all on the field.  They were really good on corner kicks, and they put in one that skimmed the top of Christopher’s head, another kids head, hit the post, and then bounced across the goal to I think hit the other post and then go in.  Just a pinball type of play, and very lucky for them.  We had so many chances to score and just could not put the goal in the back of the net.

 

Christopher did well; I had him almost exclusively on defense and he came up big for the most part.  No blame to be had on the corner kick…..he jumped up to get it and was just unlucky to only have it skip off the top of his head instead of deflect out of the way. 

No pictures of Matthew from this game; he played goal in the first half and was in the goal for the goal but again, he had no chance on that.  Came out to play the field in the 2nd half and created a penalty kick, but, this time kept it hard and low and pushed it just wide of the goal.  He was his usual blur of energy and did a good job of pushing forward with the offense to try and get the trying goal. 

TNT Spring Futbol – Game 3

I’ve watched a lot of soccer, I’ve coached a lot of soccer…….I have never never seen a game as poorly referee’d as this one.

We lost 2-1.  We deserved to lose, but man, when the other team is shoulder blocking you and flat out tackling you and nothing is called, the whole flavor of the game changes.  And our kids didn’t respond well to the challenge.

  

Matthew started (and I think we’ll see him more and more) on defense again and was solid and played pretty well during his stint up front as the 1st half ended.  The one goal we scored was a total fluke….the other team’s goalie was really cocky, to the point that he came down and put the ball in play for the corner kick.  Too bad he wasn’t smart enough to not kick the ball right at our goalie, who caught it and calmly kicked the ball the length of the field into the wide open net.

Not a fan of the all-whites…..think there should be some red highlights since red is the primary team color.

Matthew’s adventures (mis-adventures?) in goal continued in the 2nd half; he volunteered to do it.  They scored their two goals within 5 minutes of the 2nd half beginning.   The first one was off of a corner kick, the other team headed it in.  Matthew described how this goal happened after the game (“I had my hands on it and the guy headed it out of them”) and I had to show him the tape later to show, that, like last night, he started out to get the ball, but stopped and didn’t get there, and he only got his hands on it after the kid had headed it towards him.  I’ve tried to explain that the only thing that happens when he goes out and decides to go back is that he cuts down his reaction time to whatever’s going to occur in front of him; just keep going if you think you can get it.

Oh well.  The second goal he probably could have stopped as well but I think he was leaning the wrong way.

The end of the game was marked by our coach finally losing it over the officiating.  No foul is called as our guy is standing in the ‘box’ with the goalie and defender both on the ground grabbing at his legs and not letting him get a shot off.  This should have been a penalty kick; instead it was nothing and I admire Matthew’s coach for giving the referee the business for it.  Eventually, he earned a yellow card for his sarcasm, but man, I’m completely on board with it.  Classic Popeye “I’ve had all I can stands, I can stands no more!”

TNT Spring Futbol – Game 2

Friday night @ a poorly thought out field making up one of the many games we have to make up this year.  The field wasn’t good (it was a field that I’ve coached on for rec soccer….it’s grass, it has goals, but, it’s not much more than that and not what these teams are used to.

The boys powered to a 6-1 win.  Matthew spent much of the first half on defense and had one great opportunity for a goal late in the 1st half and one of his teammates stole(!) the ball from him and scored himself.  The most noticeable part of the game for Matthew was his appearance in goal in the 2nd half.  Matthew had been going to extra training for goalies the last two weeks; he’s enjoying it and seems to be doing well at it, so, now he gets his chance in a game. 

The goal we gave up wasn’t his fault….the defenseman had taken a shot to the stomach a play earlier and kind of gave up and allowed a 2-on-0 in on Matthew; Matthew did well just to get fingers on it..  They almost scored again when Matthew came out of the goal, and then decided he needed to get back in the goal, and turned around(!) and ran back, only spinning around in the end just in time to hit the ball and deflect it out of bounds.

His coach was very quick to tell him “never turn around”……and afterwards my advice to him was if you are going to come out, keep coming out until the play is done, don’t change your mind in-between, that causes problems. 

No pictures (Dad forgot to put the card back in Mom’s camera).  I have video of most of the goals, but, there’s not a lot of Matthew to be seen…..

Spring Soccer – Game 6

And then there’s games like today, where everything goes right.  Almost had a rain out (when the sun was shining and the sky was blue) because the field down in Mason was underwater from thundershowers earlier today BUT we were able to relocate to our field at Hartrick and tip off right after six.

Had a long talk with the boys before the game that if they hustled, if they were first to ball, there was no chance we could lose, and the only reason we’ve lost and had trouble in previous games is because we haven’t done those things.  So, we go out, and for 50 minutes we hustle and we are first to the ball.  We won, 3-1, against a pretty good team.  We scored our first goal on a fluke corner kick…..it was high and the goalie bobbled it into the the back of the net.

 

Matthew played well; he had a lot of good possession and created a lot of good things…..had a primo chance in front of the goal and if he just would have taken a little more time to settle the ball it would have been good….instead he sailed it way over the net.  He had a great play in the 2nd half that led to a goal….we had a free kick and he stood down near the goalie.  The ball came in, he stopped it before the goalie could get it and calmly passed it to the side where one of his teammates was rushing in and he buried it.

Cpher’s game was ok….I almost pulled him out once or twice but it didn’t come to that.  Played well enough on defense to hold down the fort but seemed to always lack a little hustle in the 1st half.  In the 2nd half, he did a great job hustling and I’ll remember one sequence towards the end of the game for a long time.  Cpher was playing forward and the other team had a corner kick and they were trying to do it in a hurry……Cpher sprinted back to get to his customary spot on the post and arrived just as they kicked the ball and turned quickly to kick the ball right back out of play.  Lots of hustle there to get to a position where he is the unquestioned best kid on the field (defender on the post for the corner kick).

Two more pictures

Coming Attractions:  Kevin has an orchestra concert Thursday and gets to play with the Philharmonic Orchestra because they are performing a piece the All-State Orchestra played…..we’ll be taping that but mostly to convert to audio, not sure if we’ll post video.  All those rain-outs have created a busy weekend for soccer; it’s the end of the CASL season and Christopher and Matthew have three games (Thu, Sat, Sun) and TNT had three games (Fri, Sat, Sun).  Matthew will be one tired boy come 3:30 pm on Sunday…….

Two Pictures:  Suzanne grabbed about five pictures at the game on Sunday…only two were worthy of being saved and posted here. 

 

A really nice close-up of Cpher.  He’s wearing, and has been wearing, a Kevin track sweatshirt that we rescued from the basement as too small for Kevin, but, just right for this guy.  Kevin ran the long distances….if Christopher ever ‘runs’ track I’m sure he’ll be tossing large objects.  And spring has definitely been sweatshirt weather around here……

Suzanne captured this photo right as Matthew hits the ball for the penalty kick.  I’m kind of surprised by this, I guess I would have thought his weight would be shifted more forward.  Suzanne and I have both, separately, noted that if you watch the video of the penalty kick the sound as he hits the ball is pretty noticeable as it echoes off the walls….

Last of the Curtains Photos…..

Presented without commentary.