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.
