Today’s game was against one of the girl’s team (not Mara’s). It was a dismal and foggy morning
Just before kick off
Both teams played well although the girls were just not able to compete effectively for most of the game. For about 10-15 minutes during the late first half they had field dominance and made several good attacks on the goal but by the second half the boys were ahead 4-0 and the girls were obviously tuckered. At that point the coach dialed back the boys’ offense to long kicks and headers to make them work harder. Two of their better players were sidelined with injuries (one with a broken arm from a previous game against Mara’s team) which didn’t help. But the girls were troopers and played hard until the final whistle.
Both teams did well on passing and setting up plays. Where the girls had problems was in pressing attacks and kicking. They seemed to have a lot of trouble with just putting a big boot on the ball when appropriate. At one point the girls had to switch out for a goal kick because the original girl wasn’t able to kick it past the outer goal box. There was one girl who had quite a foot on her who had quite a few nice long kicks.
The best moment though was another girl who crushed Josh twice, once just blowing past him with ease and another where she took the ball away from him and headed down field so quickly Josh had to look around to figure out what happened. Josh’s mom and I laughed and laughed.
Another amusing thing was that the one girl who had a really strong kick would use it to clear the ball on defense. But she wouldn’t just kick it out of bounds. She’d bounce it off the legs of an opponent and then out of bounds, thereby achieving a sweet trifecta —
Now that’s clever.
The boys had one excellent score, a cross goal kick from far right to left, deftly executed.
Corwin didn’t end up having much of a game. He got in a few good kicks and did reasonably well in encounters but the girls only pushed hard for a small part of the game and because of the paucity of big kicks there were a lot fewer opportunities for the mid-field & defenders to boot back.
Corwin wins an encounter