Tag: sports

Although I started last season well, scoring six goals in the fall half, I missed nearly half our games in the spring and didn’t score at all, missing far too many good opportunities. Scoring is funny for an attacker; when it comes easily it comes effortlessly, but the more you think about it, the harder it gets. Some of it is bad luck, some of it is nerves, and some of it is poor decision-making.

We started the season this weekend and I figured I’d get less playing time because we’ve got two new attackers in their early thirties who have moved up from the first team due to losing their starting positions to younger, better players. Along with a pair of new midfielders, they are much-needed reinforcements that should see us back in competition for the league title that we used to own. Rather to my surprise, I ended up starting at left wing, although only because the usual starter was arriving late since he was coaching one of the kid’s teams on one of our other fields.

We needed a referee, but our captain turned down Ender when he volunteered because the team we were playing is an all-Albanian team new to the league. Albanians are famous throughout Europe for their volatility, even in comparison with Italians, and it was easy to understand why a teenage referee would be a suboptimal choice. The guys were pretty pessimistic about the game in general, as apparently the Albanians had one former second-league player and at least two former third-league players, which was three more high-level players than we had.

However, I tended to like our chances a little better after the Albanians arrived and five of them turned out to be former teammates, two of whom I particularly like. The atmosphere was the exact opposite of heated, as everyone was visibly glad to see each other, many handshake-hugs were exchanged, and I realized that three of their players were technically skilled players who made our team worse two years ago because they seldom pass the ball and never, ever look outside. Better yet, the really good striker who played two games with us two seasons ago and is a serious scoring machine (5 goals in those two games), was injured and had come only along to watch, so that left the guy who had been my favorite partner up top being the only serious cause for concern among the known quantities.

We got off to a bad start, however, and it was partly my fault. The captain told me to play with a defensive orientation, as Sylvan, the defender behind me, was the weak link in the back four, being short and the only player on the team older than me. (It’s generally not a good sign when the average age of your left side is 47 and their attackers and center mids are all in their early 30s.) But despite our age, both of us are in very good condition, and for the most part, we managed to control the left… except for the one time – the ONE time – I didn’t hang back and attacked.

By that point, I knew I could beat my man, their right wing, whenever I wanted, so when we had the ball in their half and I saw the left defender follow an attacker inside, I waved at our center mid and broke hard. The timing was perfect and I was onside with a clear path to goal, but Sandro mishit the ball and it curved well behind me. Their right wing intercepted it and passed it immediately up the field to Vallon, a former teammate who doesn’t pass, but is strong, fast, and formidable on the ball. Sylvan did his best and fought him the whole way, but was overpowered and outrun, and Vallon beat Giuseppe, our keeper, without any trouble.

Despite being down, we were starting to control the action and just missed on two half-chances. The regular left wing showed up not too long after the second one, so I came out just before we started scoring. Their left wing just couldn’t cope with our right wing, who sent over a pair of crosses that both ended up in the net. Then a missed offsides call gave us a one-on-one break that one of our new attackers finished in a clinical manner, so it was 3-1 at the half.

A penalty kick and another headed cross made it 5-1 before I finally went back in, this time as an attacker. I beat the defenders on the left and had a great chance, but shot the ball a little too high, at waist-level, which let the diving goalie get his arm on it. Our left wing followed me in and should have scored on the rebound, but he tried to play around with it before shooting and was promptly shut down. My second chance was much the same, a weak left-footed shot that was blocked, but it was worse because I somehow missed seeing a wide-open Sandro in the center. (In fairness, he didn’t call for the ball, so I had no idea he was there.)

Sandro didn’t hold it against me, though, when later he dribbled around both defenders on the right, drew the goalie out to meet him, then slipped the ball backwards to me as I trailed. I probably should have driven hard to the left to clear the keeper then passed the ball into the empty net, but instead I hit it on the first touch from outside the box, putting it in a nice high arc that cleared the goalie before abruptly dipping down into the upper right corner. Thus was the duck broken. Our captain put in one more to close out the game, and we ended up winning 7-1 against the team everyone had expected to beat us.

The lesson: a team that runs and plays well together will easily beat better players who don’t run well. Losing both wings killed them, because for all their ball skills, that meant they were forced to attack straight down the clogged center, then deal with our wings and outside defenders collapsing on them if they managed to break through the two center mids and the two central defenders. At times, their wings were 20 or 30 meters behind ours, so they were consistently reduced to trying to attack 3 or 4 on 8 in limited space. It was a testimony to their skill that they managed any pressure on us at all.

Tactics + athletics beat skill. The two least-skilled starters of the 22 men on the field were our right-wing and me, and the normal starter who replaced me on the left wing isn’t much better, although at least he is left-footed. But all three of us can run, and it doesn’t matter how good your ball skills are when you’re consistently 15 meters behind the ball. And if your worst players can contribute two assists and one goal, plus control both sides of the field between them, then your team is probably in pretty good shape.

The guy who had been their keeper in the second half was my former attacking partner; he’d gone into the net at halftime. He came up to me after the game and gave me a hard time about getting stuffed on the two easier chances, then hitting on the difficult shot. I explained that I am a football artist and scoring in easy and obvious ways only bores me. He laughed, but I don’t think he bought it.

The kids wanted to go to the track today and do a speed workout. With the soccer season over, I didn’t have a good excuse to avoid doing it, so we ran a few laps followed by some 100-meter sprints, then finished with another two laps.

The good news: I can still run a 12.2 and beat Ender. I might be able to get below 12 again if I work at it this summer. My sub-11 days are clearly a long-distant memory. And despite some initial tightness, my hamstrings held up.

The bad news: I’m pretty sure I can’t hold him off at the 200 any longer. Also, I think it may take me about a week to recover.

The kids were all amused at how easily they outran me after the sprints. Apparently they were previously unfamiliar with the concept of the famous “sprinter’s jog”, which is roughly as fast as a geriatric man hobbling with a cane when he is not particularly in a hurry to get where he is going.

And in totally unrelated news, I have an absolutely shocking bit of investigative reporting to reveal to the Dread Ilk:

GLOCK Inc.@GLOCKInc
The OFFICIAL Twitter for #GLOCK.
Followed by Dave W., Adam Baldwin, Nate and Aquila Aquilonis.

What’s next for Nate, will he be endorsing Keynesian economics and changing his name to Naitlyn?

The prima squadra needed two wins in their last three games to secure promotion this season, and after scoring a 3-0 upset away last weekend, it was looking pretty good with one away game followed by a home game to end the season. But they were shut out in the penultimate game during the week, a game they had half-expected to win, which put the pressure on.

Half the village turned out for the game and it seemed to fire up the players as they came out and heavily dominated the game for the first 10 minutes. The ball barely made it into our half of the field. Then our captain got the ball halfway through midfield and the box, and despite not having position on the sweeper, he simply challenged the big guy’s speed, blew past him, and slipped a nice left-footed shot past the keeper. 1-0.

Not even five minutes later, one of our players was taken down just inside the box. The crowd was screaming for a penalty, but the referee reasonably gave us a free kick right on the line. No matter, our star striker stepped up and hit a soft, but perfectly positioned shot right in the upper corner. The keeper didn’t even move. 2-0.

The game was sealed within the first half-hour when a midfielder headed a half-cleared ball past the defense, the star striker jumped on it, pushed it past the keeper who had come out to try to get it, then casually passed the ball into the empty net. He was right in front of our group of veterans, so he dropped to one knee and threw his arms up theatrically as if accepting accolades while the crowd went wild. It was pretty funny.

Two crossbars in the second half was as close as we got to scoring again, so the game ended up 3-0, but perhaps the funniest moment was when the older striker who sometimes plays with us (and is joining us full-time this fall) went in as a substitute, got the ball, and couldn’t beat the two men on him or find anyone to pass to. He finally put it down the line and out of bounds, prompting one of my teammates to yell, “see, that’s why you’re playing with us next year!” It was a great game from a fan’s perspective, the guys were entirely in control throughout, and there were at least three genuinely spectacular exhibitions of skill that I can’t even properly describe.

All the teams were there, from the younger juniors to the vets, sporting the colors and cheering on the guys. I know all the players pretty well, having played with four of them and practicing twice with the squad, so it was a real pleasure to see them return the club to the highest level at which we’ve ever reached in our history. The players are even better acquainted with Ender, as he is being groomed to be one of their keepers of the future, so I was pleased, if a little surprised, to see him invited to join the team photo they took after the game.

It may be tough to stay up next year, but except in goal, the team is very young and I expect they will continue to improve. But promotion to this level is something that only happens perhaps once every ten or twenty years, so it was exciting to have the chance to be a part of it.

Er, never mind. I have no idea how I ended up on an old article about AD’s contract. I thought they tore up the old one and gave him a new one, but apparently all that has happened is that he’s back for OTAs.

Throughout The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons writes repeatedly about The Secret, and identifies specific NBA teams like the Bad Boys Pistons, the Russell Celtics or the Duncan Spurs that knew it and gained success by it.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen the same thing on the soccer field with my veterans team. My first two years, we were the champions, I was the number five striker, and we simply overwhelmed our opponents by scoring five or six goals almost every single game. But then age and injury began to strike, and at one point, I ended up the number two striker for an entire season, and when the number one striker went out, found myself trying to carry the scoring load up front on my own.

We brought in a number of new players, but despite them being quite skilled, we found ourselves not only being beaten by the best teams in the league, but unable to defeat lesser teams we should have been able to beat without any trouble.

At the beginning of the spring season, things looked really bad as our second-best player and new captain had to have surgery on his hand that rendered him hors de combat for the entire season. Not only that, but our best player has been injured and we’ve only gotten one-half out of him.

And yet, somehow we managed to not only win our local derby two weeks ago, but trounce them 3-0, with all three goals coming in the first half. Last night, we were playing the league leaders, who feature one former international and a fast-paced, highly skilled attack that has scored twice as many goals as we have this year.

But what is different now is that we have a group of players who don’t quit and who don’t give up on each other. We went down 1-0, then 2-1, and were still down 2-1 when I got in at halftime. Their defense had been stifling our new top striker, who’d recently come up from the first team, but once I scared them with an otherwise useless run or two, they started putting two on me and giving the new guy more room to work. I did very little but pull defenders away from him, but that was enough to help him level the game at 2-2.

In back, the defenders were just about killing themselves as well as the faster, better strikers and midfielders from the other side. They gave up two penalties, but our keeper made brilliant saves on both of them to keep us in the game. I stole a ball from a defender, but then didn’t see a wide-open midfielder to my left, and passed instead to my off-side fellow striker, ruining what should have been an excellent chance. Overall, it was a pretty poor game for me… except on this team, everyone keeps encouraging you to keep running, keep working, keep trying, keep doing your job. My job isn’t to score, or even to make assists, my job is to stretch the field, occupy the defense, and create space for our better players.

So, despite all my screwups, our right wing didn’t hesitate to put a long through ball for me towards the corner with only a minute or two left. And I didn’t give up when the defender tried to obstruct me as I started to go by him, as when he put his arm across my chest, I simply pulled it behind me and fought my way past him. When I broke free, the referee finally blew his whistle and correctly called the defender for the initial foul, which he probably wouldn’t have done if I’d backed down. The right wing stepped up and put a beautiful 25-meter free kick in the upper corner. 3-2. Game over.

There was no way we should have won that game. They were absolutely the better team in at least 8 of the 11 positions. And they play together well too; there were several strings of 10+ passes where no one on our team even touched the ball. But they have too many skilled technicians and not enough petty role players. The secret of sports is that the team where everyone accepts his role and throws himself into it 100 percent is usually going to beat the better team where the pecking order and the responsibilities are not as firmly established.

The NFL drops the hammer on Brady and the Patriots:

The NFL came down hard on its biggest star and its championship team, telling Tom Brady and the Patriots that no one is allowed to mess with the rules of the game. The league suspended the Super Bowl MVP Monday for the first four games of the season, fined the New England Patriots $1 million and took away two draft picks as punishment for deflating footballs used in the AFC title game.

It seems reasonable, or it would if they hadn’t suspended AD for the entire 2014 season and suspended Ray Rice indefinitely for things that didn’t call the competitive balance of the game into question.

This is an open post to discuss the NFL draft. Skol Vikings!

So tonight Ender’s team played a friendly against a women’s 1st league team. Ender’s team are juniors, which means they are between the ages of 15 and 18; essentially a high school varsity team. 1st league is the top female level below the professional teams.

Out of curiosity, I timed it. Despite the boys mostly showboating and ball-hogging against a defense with 9 players in the box, the boys nearly had a tap-in goal in the first 30 seconds. And it took 9 minutes before the ball crossed midfield in possession of the women. It was 8-0 at halftime, at which point the coaches put some of our first team players who had finished their practice in with the women, and had some of the players switch teams. That made it a little more interesting for everyone.

Ender played the second half for the boys and only let in one goal, but it was against one of the first team men. So, when you hear people trying to tell you that women can compete with men in anything athletic, you’ll know they’re not to be taken seriously.

And to put it in perspective, this was the junior team that lost 5-1 to the men’s first team. Which lost to our veterans team. It’s not that the women couldn’t play, they were actually pretty sound both technically and tactically. But they just played at a much slower speed. You’d see a woman with a 10-foot lead on the ball, and yet the boy would still get to the ball first. The boys didn’t really use their strength or size advantage, merely the speed differential was sufficient to render the game uncompetitive.

Soccer has started up again at the higher levels. Last night Ender’s team scrimmaged the first team on the main field while we veterans held a normal practice on the practice field. We ended early enough for me to catch the last quarter of the game; Ender played the second half and did pretty well. He only let in two goals, one of which should have been called for offsides, and while he was a bit shaky with the offseason rust, he did better than the starting goalie, who let in three, one of which was a disaster. Needs some work on his goal kicks and distributions, but the punting was good.

I’m rusty myself. Six shots, and all but one wide by inches. Everything is going a little to the right, so I need to adjust for that. The ball control is better than I’d expected, and while all my offseason running and stretching has helped – I can actually walk today, contra SB’s expectations – there is no substitute for the actual sprint-and-stop of gameplay.

It’s clear that Ender isn’t going to take over for the starter this season, he’s a good guy who is three years older and has earned his place. At this point, Ender is better off playing spot duty and second halves when the game is under control than dealing with all the pressure from still-immature players who blame the goalie for permitting scores after complete defensive breakdowns.

The first team won 5-1, and they did so without breaking a sweat. It was clearly humiliating to the cocky younger guys, who are of American high school varsity age and all seemed to be three inches taller than they were when the fall season started. Ender did not take it at all well when I mildly observed that when we veterans played the first team last fall, we beat them by three goals.

It’s rather amusing. The juniors tend to instinctively treat the veterans as if we’re old and past it until they notice that the first team players, who are all in their 20s, tend to regard us as older comrades. The kids don’t know that most of of the first-teamers have played with us from time to time because when we’re short; we’re allowed to field up to two younger players when we have less than 14 men.

The one thing the young guys never seem to figure out is that if you’re still playing soccer 25 years after you started playing at the first team level, you were probably pretty damn good at it back in the day. Our entire team is probably as talented as the average of the best four junior players, we’re just older, fatter, balder, and slower than they are. Technically, I’m one of the worst players on my team and there isn’t a defender on the juniors team that could shut me down. Combine that with the fact that we’re more experienced, more muscular, and some of our players have been playing together for 30 years, and they don’t have a chance. But they never put two and two together until they go up against the old men on the field.

It was the same at my old club, which competed at a higher level. When the club held a tournament of champions for its 75th Anniversary, and invited back all the teams that had ever won promotion for a 7-on-7 tournament, the team that won was not either of the two most recently promoted first teams, but my veteran’s team that had won two successive promotions the previous two years. For me, though, the most memorable thing was seeing a first team from 40 years before, and the frail, white-haired, white-bearded goalie who at 65 was still better than Ender or the starting junior’s goalie. I wasn’t surprised to hear that after playing for our first team, he’d gone on to play a few years for a championship team at the professional level.

It’s all part of the process, the circle of soccer. The juniors are growing up, some of them at different rates than others. The exposure to the first team at the end of last year was important, because it made it clear to them that all their idiotic pecking order games are over. At the first team level, nobody gives a damn about much except how well you play and what you have to contribute to the team. The kid who attacked and exchanged bloody noses with Ender in the first practice last fall is now polite and respectful, and as Ender noted, almost salutes when I address him. He and Ender aren’t friends, but they play well together, the kid is a solid defender who takes his job of protecting his goalie seriously. Conflict isn’t always a bad thing.

There are still some problem children. The tall and arrogant sweeper took the ball last night despite Ender calling for it as he came out, then told Ender that he didn’t give a fuck when Ender chewed him out for it. Their coach, who is a first team player and the first good coach most of these kids have had in their entire careers, shrugged and told Ender to simply go for the ball and take the sweeper out the next time he doesn’t listen. He’s one of those big, athletic kids who needs to be taken down a few times before he’s able to pay attention; I’m going to suggest to our captain that we scrimmage the juniors for just that purpose. The kid has three inches on me, but I’ve got 30 pounds of muscle on him; I figure that after I blow by him a few times, score a couple of goals, and put him down on the ground once or twice, he’ll be in more of a mood to listen.