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!”.
