Tonight, my soccer team (the Average Joes - mostly fathers of kids who now go to or previously went to my kids' elementary school) played the sixth game of our first season.
We lost...
Again...
Not too surprising - it was against the team in first place in our division and the same team who, um... to be polite, beat us 15-2 in our very first game. However, we played a lot (!) better tonight. We "only" lost 7-0 and only gave up 1 goal in the entire second half. A much better showing than we've put forward before.
I played 6 or 7 shifts - my first was about 10 minutes long in the first half as forward. I've found that forward is one of the least taxing positions on the team because (unfortunately) the ball tends to spend most of its time in the other end of the field. I try to stay about midfield so that I can be somewhat ready when we recover the ball (typically when our goalie makes a stop - and tonight he made a lot of them!) to receive the ball downfield.
I've found (or perhaps confirmed) tonight that my major weaknesses are still lack of experience with dribbling and lack of knowing the techniques to really kick the ball hard. The latter came to light when I had a couple breakaway plays going downfield and couldn't put enough oomph behind the ball to feel like the shots on goal (OK - "shots near goal" ;-) ) had any chance of getting past the goalie. I've got to practice, practice, practice!
We have two more games left and then our next season will be starting just a week or two after the last game. I'm hoping we continue to improve. It'd be nice to feel like we're at least being competitive in a game.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment