No Practice Makes No Perfect

We played Springfield last night...and alas came up short...final score 0 to 4. We had some opportunities but failed to get a decent shot in that would have taken some of the pressure off of us. I felt we were pretty evenly matched and our defense was adequate to keep them from scoring. Several of the goals were soft as it appears our organization suffered just a little and just broke down enough to let them through.

Our attempts at passing, and our opportunities to pass, were terrific. I think we played with our heads up and quite well as a team in this regard. I was happy about our team play. Alas, missing from our game last night was the accuracy in our passes. I heard a lot of apologies when a pass went wide. In my mind the reason that our passes were inaccurate was because we failed to get enough warm-up in before the start of the game. There are two reasons for this. First, we didn’t physically get on the field until 8 pm. The ref gave us about 4 minutes before he blew the whistle to begin. That is not enough time for a proper warm up, let alone getting a few touches on the ball. The fields are becoming a problem. It’s looking more and more likely that the league let us down and our home games will begin at 9 pm. This is compounded by the fact that another team is practicing on our field until 9 pm. If there was a game ahead of ours they would be off the field by 8:30. But with practice they will not leave until 9 pm sharp and then we will no doubt need to run them off. The ref will be looking to start the game as early as possible.

Without the field early there will be little time to practice and less time to get organized on the field. As the manager, I simply will not get any touches on the ball, as I will get called to the center circle almost immediately. If you want to see horrible passing watch me start playing cold. Yet we still need to warm up, get some hard passes and hard traps in, shots on goal and our keeper needs to warm up. Can’t do that all in 4 minutes.

Second, during the past two games I’ve noticed another phenomenon occurring. The ref seems to be starting the clock on the hour, regardless if we are playing or not. He deducts the time we are not playing from the time in the first half. We will have the field from 9 until 11 at which time the lights will go out. I’m considering scheduling the ref for game time to begin at 9:15. That way will will always get 15 minutes to practice once we take the field. The game is already starting late, and I hate to do it, but I think it is the only way to proceed...but I’d like to hear other suggestions. I will clear this with the other manager as well.

One more thing, last night we had guys who arrived 30 minutes before the game...but since we didn’t take the field we didn’t get much practice in. But we also had a few guys arriving just before the whistle. From a arrival time perspective, I do not intend to change the schedule. If the game starts at 9, be there before 9. I’m only planning on telling the ref that the game starts at 9:15. That way he works for us, and we don’t work for him.

I going to give Man of the Match honors to Gooch for his performance last night. He seemed to have boundless energy, was taken down a couple of times and kept his head, and he broke up more than a few plays on defense, but got forward a number of times to aid the attack.

Special thanks to Robbie and Matthew who joined us from Springfield last night and gave us the ability to rotate at least one substitute.