Second game of the season, but first game for us!

So, this is my first blog, but I'll try to keep it nice and professional sounding. Anybody can post to this, but the main idea is to create an avenue for the players to interact and make comments about the game.

Because I've just got back from living in German cities for the past 6 and a half years I still have a problem with driving ( I also don't have insurance yet), so I took public transportation to the game site. It took me about an hour and a half. But it was worth it. I was in Mexican-American soccer fanatic wonderland. Indeed, most of the faces I saw were those of Mexican-Americans, and so what- were all equal on the pitch.

So I got there at about 10:30 to make sure I would be on time and to warm up a bit. The game was to be at 11:40, and the team had agreed to meet at 11. 10:50 comes around and I'm checking for early birds. No team. 11:00- no team. I see the first signs of playmates at just past 11, but the area is huge, with at least 6 different soccer pitches and 6 games being played simultaneously.

So, the main organizer shows up with 3-5 others. This is our team, but I knew this was how it would be. Interestingly enough, everyone knows where our game is to be played. Metroleague is one of the highest amateur leagues in LA, and it was definitely the highest league at that park.


The Game: we start off really unorganized. Rather than having a formation worked out we start to call out favored positions while on the pitch. In the first few minutes we had about 3 players playing central midfield, but we eventually found our places and some things started to work out.

Although I am not sure about this I think about 8 of the 11 players on the pitch had never played with each other before. Oh, and we had no 'gelernte' (properly trained) goalkeeper (although he did a fantastic job).

I think we gave up our first goal between the 35th and 40th minute. Our opponents had earned it at that point, but only just. Things were pretty even keeled even up to half time.

Morale was still pretty strong at half time. We assessed our difficulties and weaknesses constructively and well. We knew we just had to be patient, get lucky and quite simply, play better.

As the second half started we came out with a continuation of our already surprisingly good effort. But, as you could imagine with a team that had never played together, we lacked certain things which make a team more dangerous offensively. We suffered from that as our opponents put one more up in about the 50th minute.

The team was not daunted by this, however, and we were able to make it 1-2 to their favor. About 5 minutes later the floodgates broke.

The slight edge that our opponent had all throughout the game got stronger somewhere after the 55th minute. By the time their holding midfielder (one of their very vocal leaders and a fine player) scored their confidence was so high that we couldn't catch up.

I'm embarrassed by the final result. It suffices to say that we scored only the one goal and they had more than 3 goals and much less than 10.

But I think spirits were still high and of course, hopeful for a W at our next match.

Peter