Blue skies, but *hot*…..we brought the canopy and will pull that out for the afternoon games so that the boys aren’t baking on the bench…..
(getting ready to start Game 1…yes, that’s Cam over there with red tips in his mohawk)
So how did my predictions fare? In game 1 they were dead on…we cruised to a 8-0 win. Matthew played pretty well…he was sprinting, he was heading the ball, he was passing, just doing really good stuff. He scored the seventh goal and had a big assist on the eighth….
(I think he misses this one)
Missed more than a few headers though…they would just go over his head. I’m going to show him some film of this….if he misses once he should probably go five yard further back until he understands the goalie’s range…..
The other team wasn’t good…..we could dribble and pass with ease. I guess, in the end, it was a good warm-up for Game 2.
(waiting for Ole to bring it, latican-style!)
We knew, from the website, that Vardar South had beaten Ole 5-1 in the other first game this morning, so, we need to win here to keep up to hopefully make it pass the group stage of the games…..
(how do you say “you shall not pass” in latican-style?)
Ole SC was better, as predicted. We were winning 4-1 before giving two goals back to win 4-3. Kind of a different game than the first one…..
(first in series of three photos…..)
Matthew again had an awesome game; he had a sweet assist on the first goal and his hustling and footwork led to a great cross that turned into our fourth goal….
As near as I can tell, latican-style means “we will pressure you and force us to beat us one-on-one”. It was interesting to see which players of our team were able to deal with this and which ones struggled…
(second in a series….latican-style means this guy is supposed to take Matthew…)
Matthew, not surprisingly, can play latican-style just fine. Beat one kid, beat two kids, ok, fine with him. He made this move, he made another move, he ‘megged’ one dude (kicked the ball one way and circled the dude to the other side to get the ball….smaller quicker soccer players usually go with this move), just a pretty cool display of where Matthew is at right now soccer-wise.
(third in a series….Mathew wins this battle of latican-style playing)
So we win 4-3 and know that it means we need to win tomorrow to move on. Turn out that the way the rest of the tournament went that if we tie we move on as well…
Saturday ended with Matthew getting a chance to play goalie for the White team…..I mention it here because Matthew has asked to play goalie and was excited for it, and happily, still wants to play some goalie. But his team was overmatched and quit in front of him and they lost 12-2….Matthew got shelled.
There are no pictures from Game 3 on Sunday morning…..(edit….Henry’s Mom just uploaded some photos…let me put them here…..
(HM photo 1: Matthew hoping to get a rebound, latican-style)
(HM photo 2: Matthew taking it latican-style to another poor Ole player…..I wonder if I’m going to get any hits for the words latican-style in search engines soon…)
(HM photo 3: More latican-style own-age)
(HM photo 4: the best of the HM photos…working hard here!)
where were we…oh yeah, no photos in the Vardar South game….Suzanne said it was too intense to take photos. I have some video, but, really, didn’t do that because the game got so crazy and out of control….
We came out slow and were down 1-0. on a very questionable missed offside call and then down 2-0 after our goalie, again, tips a corner kick into our own net(!…this is very frustrating to me…it shouldn’t happen, and it’s happened twice this year in the biggest games we are playing in.)….
HM has one photo from this game that I saved….
(Coach Alex getting a yellow card)
Several more VS breakaways occur without the correct offisde call….Coach Alex progressively goes a little more insane and finally the refs (who deserved his abuse) give him a yellow card (and Alex deserved the card for the abuse he gave them).
We rally….we score once it’s 2-1 them….we score again before half, it’s 2-2 as we head to the break.
I think we give up a goal maybe 10 seconds after kickoff in the 2nd half…..it’s 3-2 them. The refs do some more stupid offside calls….the VS coach gets mad, Alex gets irked about the time-wasting, and the refs, who clearly told both coaches that there would be no more abuse after the half, give the VS coach a yellow and give Alex another yellow, that’s red, he’s gone for the rest of the game.
In the first half, VS dominated the first 10 minutes of the half and then we slowly but surely gained control of the game, whether that’s from them slowing down or us waking up…..but the same thing happened in the second half…as time went on we wore them down and then finally with about 10 minutes to go we punched in a goal and tied it 3-3. And the game stayed that way to the end….we move on to the semi-finals.
Matthew played a whale of a game; very physical…he took a ball to the gut while jumping to block it…kept running while wincing and playing through it. Made his best effort to head a ball in for a goal and had to crouch real low, took the ball at a funny angle and twisted his ankle a bit, still got up and hobbled upfield to play defense.
So, we play in the semi-final against Canton Celtic 02 Black….we played them twice last fall and they ate our lunch.
And they ate our lunch again. We lost 9-1….the 1 being a Matthew free kick with about 3 minutes left that he scored on from about 20 yards out. A really good shot.
it was close for a while….2-0 with maybe 10 minutes to go in the half. But we reverted to kick-ball not soccer, and just kept giving the ball back to them…..
(Matthew is tasked here with guarding #30 on the corner kick. He’s a head taller than Matthew)
(this game wasn’t one of Matthew’s finer moments….tired? I think he needs to be more of a leader when things go south and everyone stops running and puts their heads down…..sometimes he is, sometimes he isn’t….)
(this picture sums up the last game pretty well….this guy will get by three of our players, and then beat a fourth…..should never happen)
Good tournament, played well….and have an ass-kicking to think about as we move forward towards the season….
