Headed west to Chicago for Matthew’s second tournament of the year. The scheduling did not do us any favors again….didn’t make it back home until almost midnight on Sunday.
Cpher: Missed football to come west with us. They won(!); 33-0(!!) against Holt.
Nike Classic Cup: Any tournament where you play more than the basic number of games is a good tournament; we advanced to the finals but lost there.
First game was 12:50 Saturday against Bettendorf (Iowa). We won 1-0.
Suzanne caught this series of photos of Matthew’s highlight from the game; another shot off the crossbar. This time he is way out on a free kick and says he was trying to cross the ball. If so, this was not the greatest of crosses.
At practice the other night I watched him hit the crossbar three of four times from distance; it is popular for the boys to aim for it. Given that, and that he has hit two crossbars in consecutive games, I’ve asked him to start aiming 2-4 inches lower from now on!
You’ll note Matthew has his old blue top on; he packed the wrong one for the trip. Kind of miss the pattern at the back of these unis….we’ve been ‘forgetting’ quite a few soccer items recently for practice and so we are now doing a physical inventory of items before we leave the house….sigh.
No photos after this one….Suzanne stopped to watch the rest. You can see the actual shot in the highlights below though!
Second game is against Chicago Fire Juniors North at 8:50 pm. That’s awfully late for a bunch of kids from the eastern time zone; was happy they were almost all up and running around the hotel on Friday night at this time playing hide and seek (not sure how much the hotel guests appreciated this move though!)
The only usuable picture from this game is above; need to review what camera settings are best for night games since a whole lot of pictures didn’t turn out well. We ended up winning 4-1 in a game that wasn’t particularly close.
Next game is at 8:50 am. Really think there should be some guidance that you should get 12 hours minimum between games on different days; the other team certainly had that. We played the Croatian Eagles (Wisconsin) and won 3-2. We only needed to score one goal to advance (we could have lost 20-1 and it wouldn’t have mattered) so once we did score that goal the team kind of coasted for the rest of the game….we really shouldn’t have given up those two goals.
One nice thing about all of these games? You could set up in an elevated position above the field. Great video!
Thought Matthew played well this weekend. Not great; he started backsliding into deferring to his teammates on the ball and had some untimely turnovers.
The beginning of a new trend; other teams have done this to us…parked a kid in front of our goalie to block the goalie’s view. Heck, TKO last weekend would park kids in front and behind our goalie so he couldn’t move. So, Matthew has taken up doing it for us.
The final was against Kopion FC from Wheaton, Illinois. We lost 4-1. The game was basically over at the half.
It was pretty even though; they scored first and then we had a beautiful chance and our striker was fouled in the box. No call! A PK would have changed the game at that point. Instead, it was back and forth for about 20 minutes before we made a really bad mistake and they scored. And scored again. And that was the end of that.
Game started at 4:50 pm. Didn’t leave the Chicago Area until 6:30; stopped for dinner (and arrived at the rest stop right after the bus so that took a long time) but for the first time in a long time everyone slept (but me) on the way home and we drove straight through…made it home at about 11:40 pm.
Highlights: I have continued to make highlight ‘films’ for our games. You can click on any of the photos below to get to the video.
Bettendorf – The picture shows where Matthew’s free kick ended up…..
Game 3: Croatian Eagles
