Kevin: A short tennis update, Kevin/Kyle won 6-1 on Monday. Tuesday I would bet brings the rematch of the first game they lost…..
Matthew: The soccer season starts off like the other two before it, with three maybe four games at the tournament hosted by our soccer club.
Friday night we get word that our 9:45 game has been rescheduled because of rain to 7:30 am….ugh. And of course, it is still raining pretty good when we arrive on-site at 7 am.
Game 1: We win 4-1 against Canton Celtic White. We played them twice last year and handled them and that didn’t change much this go round. Matthew scored the first goal on a rebound from the goalie and had a sweet assist to set up the 2nd play; he made this long pass over about half the field to set up Zane on a breakaway. Matthew was everywhere, picking passes off, dribbling, heading balls…..I said it to Suzanne, that might have been the best game I’ve seen from him. Ever.
No video / photos due to water everywhere
Game 2: Remember that 7:30 am start? This is the second game; a 7:15 pm start…good news is that the rain stopped about noon and the field is pretty dry. We win 4-2 against Grand Rapids Crew Black. Tied 1-1 at the half….it was nice to see the boys play tough and come through for the win…..sometimes this group folds like a cheap tent.
A few random notes with some photos I pulled from the video….
Matthew has just taken the ball form the GR kid on the ground and will drive up field. Love how confident he seems with the ball right now….he is almost to the point of over-dribbling and I would call it on him sometimes if I didn’t know better…he’s always been a pass-first kind of guy. He only keeps it if a good pass isn’t available.
Gray t-shirts today because we are still waiting for the new red uniforms to come in…..another turnover here turns into a push up field….
I won’t say Matthew is lighter….but he hasn’t gained any weight and he’s in good shape and you can see it on the field…he’s followed this kid all the way up the field in full stride, catches him, and forces the ball out of bounds to stop their fast break….
This might be the most long-term interesting part of the game…the increased reliance on Matthew’s head in our game plan. Over and over our coach would yell out for the team to aim the ball for Matthew’s head on free kicks and goal kicks. And he gets it a lot. And he is now doing a great job of redirecting the ball in the direction he wants it to go. Here, the ball is being punted from our goalie towards Matthew, who is flicking it on to our offense up field.
This is all good.
Matthew had told us he feels a lot of pressure now to get these balls….we have said as long as the effort is there the results don’t matter, and if the the effort is there he will get the results his team needs. And, a bonus, is that watching Matthew pick ball after ball out of the air is great encouragement to others to do it too…
The troublesome part of this game was that Matthew came out of the game late complaining that his head hurt from all of the headers…..Suzanne and I have made it a priority to talk to him a little bit more after each game about how he’s doing…especially if he’s hitting 10-12 balls a game with his head (and that’s the number we’re heading towards now, given our team aims for him and he tries to intercept the other teams balls…)
The 2 wins today mean that no matter what happens in the first game.tomorrow we will be in the finals.
