The weather still sucks; rainy and in the fifties for today’s game. Other games in the area were cancelled due to wet and soggy fields; I’m happy this one wasn’t…I’m tired of rescheduling.
We won 2-1. The team played a lot better but left a lot of chances on the field.
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I had Cpher and Matthew playing forward together for a while; Suzanne caught this picture while they were both waiting for a throw-in. They both had haircuts this morning as well…..
We have a corner kick here and Christopher is at his customary offensive-corner-kick position….near or right in front of the goalie.
Cpher also has a defensive-corner-kick position….he lines up on the post nearest the ball and has explicit instructions to prevent any ball from coming at the goal near the net. He does this very well, he booted one ball that was coming in twice as far away at one point….and forced/convinced the other team to abandon that approach and kick the ball out away from our goal.
A nice picture of Matthew, but a poor picture of Matthew’s form….he really shouldn’t be sliding or lunging in like this…..
Matthew and Christopher both played well in the 1st half as we moved out to a 2-0 lead. I think Cpher had a very good game…especially in comparison to the previous few games……
In the 2nd half, we went to a place where we haven’t been in a long while in outdoor soccer……We deployed Cpher in goal. Told the team to gear up for this change and that we had to play good defense. Cpher played really well in goal….he made the routine saves of balls in the air and came out and collected the balls that came into his area quite nicely. His goal kicks were excellent….at times it looked like he wasn’t even trying to kick the ball hard and it would go 3/4 of the field in the air. He made one save that was amazing…..the ball came in like a rocket to his left and he stuck out his foot and the ball hit it and bounced up and over the goal. His other big save was pretty dramatic, hit the post, bounced out and bounced off him and dribbled juuuust wide of the net. The goal he gave up anybody was going to give up…..
I kept the team in the 2-2-1 formation we’ve been favoring until near the end of the game when the other team was really pressing for the tying goal and I dropped another player back. I had Matthew on defense at one point and after the game we turned to Cpher and said “Do you know how much your little brother loves you? He took a huge shot for you!”. It might have been right after this goal kick….the other team picked the ball off and was driving in and had a really powerful shot…..Matthew jumped up and blocked it and you could hear the ‘thump’ of the ball hitting his lower chest……
