First, some coming attractions:
- Greektown (A Suzanne and Scott night out!)
- The last of the elementary music programs….
- A discussion of recent results in standardized tests
But, today’s post is all about the soccer (again). Since this has been the strangest winter ever, our coach really tempted fate and scheduled a scrimmage outdoors. And lo and behold it’s 60 and sunny with a little bit of wind from the southwest…..a nice day to be outside.
The U10s split into two teams and scrimmaged for three 25-minute periods. No score was kept; but, I filmed most of the first and some of the second period before I got tired of it. Of course, Matthew scores the last two goals of the scrimmage and I have no tape of that!
But, I did clip out about 2 minutes of tape to keep forever, and, it gives me something to talk about here…you can click on any of the pictures to get to the video….
I haven’t done it much, but, I sat down with Matthew and watched these clips…I wanted him to tell him how well he was doing in certain cases and follow-up on one defensive technique in another. Here, Matthew does what I think he does better than almost anyone else…he is about to take possession of the ball and make a pass that is going to release one of our forwards to score. When Matthew is active on defense and in the middle of the field our offense becomes very hard to stop….
it’s a crappy picture, but, this is Matthew doing what Matthew does best….heading a ball out of the center of the field. Again, two touches later and this ball is in the back of the net for another goal…..
It looks like the plan is that if we have seven players on the field, we'll be configured with 1 forward up front and 2 kids back for defense. The other four will be midfielders loosely configured in a diamond-shape…one boy will be a more offensive midfielder, two on the wings, and then a more defensive midfielder….and that role seems to be where Matthew is going to end up. That will probably allow him to be more engaged on offense and produce more moments like this one where he has moved right, cut back, and takes a left(!) shot that beats the goalie but is stopped short of the goal line by a defender. Really happy that he tried to score left-footed.
The transition away from total defense was not without difficulty….Matthew is very conscientious about defense and if the backs drift forward he will naturally fall back to cover for them…..the coach was talking to him quite a bit about this today….
This photo is in the 2nd period; Matthew has just taken possession of the ball and is about to pass it up the field and release a forward for a nice run.
As the game went on I stopped taping the ball and just focused on Matthew…I wanted him to see the difference between the 1st period, when he was active and on the ball, and the second, where he was tired and just kind of running back and forth and not really making any effort to interact with the ball. And, that’s what mostly happened….but there was this play, where he did step up and take possession of the ball, and it’s about a minute of video that I decided to keep.
You can hear me say this on the video (I kept the audio after the play where I’m talking with Suzanne) but I wasn’t very happy that Matthew passed the ball almost as soon as he took possession….that is almost always a sure sign that he’s tired….just wants to get rid of the ball instead of dribbling. And here, he had a whole bunch of room in front of him to dribble.
But, he passed, and you can hear the coach say nice job and then talk to Matthew and say maybe he could have passed it sooner……
Matthew and I have watched it a few times….once for me to apologize for doubting his soccer-genius, but another time or two to see if he could have passed it sooner. We finally agreed that he probably couldn’t have…..he gets the ball, gets possession as he looks up, and kicks it…there isn’t even a second dribble.
I still think I’d rather see him dribble more….I think the team would rather see the ball at his feet than somewhere else. But what do I know?
