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Suzanne and I were talking about how the “scoring all the time” Matthew seems to have disappeared and been replaced by the “passing” Matthew.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.
