It never stops…
On Goal: Matthew attended the week long camp again. This time we asked a friend from the soccer team to join us.
Matthew competing in Goalie Wars (click on the picture for the video)
Other weeks have been more successful than this one at camp; Matthew’s team lost in the World Cup final 3-0. The good news is that they had to beat two teams to get there, and did so pretty convincingly. The bad news is that they weren’t very competitive in the final game. I don’t think Matthew played very well all week; he certainly wasn’t the aggressive little boy that he needed to be to compensate for some of his team’s weaknesses.
He did return to defend his Goalie War title…that didn’t go so well either. He won the first two rounds, but, lost in the final (that’s the picture above) to a kid that probably would have beaten 9 times out of 10. But that’s the way it goes sometimes…..
Extra training: Matthew came home from school toward the end of the school year and said “hey, one of the fourth grade teachers said that her son was interested in doing some soccer training this summer”. Coincidentally, I had just started to ask around to see if anyone was interested in running some session.
Matthew has gone to 3 or 4 of them; 90 minutes each, most with one other boy (I thought more would show up from the team…but no). They’ve been surprisingly good and Matthew has gotten a lot of good soccer workouts in, especially focusing on his footwork and first touch.
Bath 4v4: Summer also means a bunch of small-sided soccer tournaments. Our European vacation ruled us out of the first event, soccer in the sand over in Grand Haven. We understand we missed a really fun event, but, hey, we were in Europe.
The first of the 4v4’s that Matthew is playing and I’m coaching was last weekend; the last time a boy did the Bath 4v4 was Kevin…that’s a long time ago. We are playing U10 after talking a little bit about playing U12.
In hindsight, I guess we should have played U12. We had to stop or slow down to keep two of the game scores reasonable and the boys didn’t react well to that and actually tied a U9 rec team because they were so out of it and not engaging when they needed to. We finish group stage in 2nd place, one 7-0 win, one 2-2 tie.
The knockout stage was kind of strange, we play the #1 seed in the second game (we won the first game against the #7 seed 6-0 and were in stall mode most of the second half). The #1 seed was a bunch of kids from a travel soccer team down in Jackson…so, we think it will be a good game.
This is from Game 2, the tie that will not be spoken of. Matthew, like in most 4v4 games, is back on defense. He made a few goofs that directly lead to goals but man, we gave up 3 goals in 5 games and most of that is because of him.
He scored one goal (ok, not really, but, we’ll get to that) but had more than a few assists as he would grab the ball, dribble up field, and make a nice pass over for the easy score.
This is Matthew all day long….big kicks out of our end. Our team, and their team, are way back near the other goal. We ended up stationing two players on the sides as targets for Matthew and then a midfielder about 15 feet back towards Matthew to collect deflections off the targets and their defenders. Worked out really well.
This picture is from the 4th game against the #1 seed. You can click on the picture for the video.
We are winning 1-0 at halftime….they were kind of stupid, or maybe lulled to sleep by playing weak teams…they kept rushing four kids forward into the offensive zone and we made them pay on a counter-attack. Being able to do that, and having Matthew able to boot the balls 3/4 of the field, forced them to drop a kid back for the rest of the game. They took a lot of shots, but, they weren’t good shots, and we didn’t have a lot of trouble defending them or watching them go wide.
The picture, and video, above is of the first 45 seconds of the xecond half. Matthew takes this free kick and gets it high…if the green kid doesn’t get it the ball it’s going to go to our kid moving in towards the goal. The green kid heads it….into his own goal.
Sadly, for them, the kid dissolves into tears and never comes back….and I’ve been there in a 4v4 tournament and had talked with the boys about it at halftime. We score again 30 seconds later, and go on to win 4-0.
I don’t have photos or videos of the final game (and the game at that point was pretty much over) but Matthew had a great header to clear the ball away from the net (it was going to go in…he headed the ball up, it bounced in front of the goal and then over the goal).
As always, the chest bump is the preferred form of celebration….
We won the final game 6-1….I think it was 3-0 at the half and it was 5-0 before they scored (Matthew completely misplayed a ball and the guy went right by him….oh well). I neglected to mention so far we did this without a sub….we were supposed to have five players but one didn’t show. I told the boys all day that it wasn’t an excuse, they should all be able to play 10-minute halves of soccer without needing a break.
The 2012 U10 Bath 4v4 Champions: The Fireballs.
