Orangemen vs FC Valpo

Another summer game down...the fall season quickly approaches.  Only four games left until Fall Soccer is here and one of those games is on the weekend of the Wounded Warrior tournament where we will be extremely short handed.  So if you are not playing in the tournament, on the 20th of July, let me know.  We will have to call in substitutes and visiting players to field a side for sure.   In other news, Le Tour started on our game day last Saturday.  It’s a special tour this year as it celebrates it’s 100th year of the bike race.  Despite the controversy over performance enhancing drugs, Lance Armstrong, et al, it’s still the World Cup of bike racing. The first stage got rolling and for the first time, the grand tour traveled to the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean.   I never realized, one, how big Corsica is, and two, how mountainous it is.  It looked like the riders were in the Pyrenees on the first stage.  If you haven’t been following the tour, you should.  It’s a fantastic athletic event, and if you didn’t know, Maurico is a huge bike rider, and when he isn’t playing for the Orangemen, he’s on his road bike training for road races.  It was a big weekend for sports, The Confederations Cup Final was played in Brazil on Sunday.  Brazil defeated Spain, 3 to 1.  This competition is really just a warm-up for the World Cup next year. It’s not a game with too much meaning other than to test the venues to see if Brazil is ready to host the big event next year.  If you will recall, Confederations Cup 2009, the year before the 2010 World Cup, was played in South Africa, and coincidentally Brazil won the final there as well.  But not so coincidentally, the United States played in that Final and was defeated by Brazil 3 to 2.  Did anyone notice that the US was playing in a International Final on the World Stage?  Not really.  Just like no one really cares that the World Champions, Spain, went down to Brazil in a humiliating defeat.  However, that all changes in about 11 months.  Everyone in the world will be watching the World Cup 2014 get kicked off in Brazil next summer.  Get ready to have a World Cup get together or two next June.  Think of some ideas and feed them too me.  Let’s get ready for a fun season.

OK, some of you might be interested in the game recap.  Me, not so much.  We played FC Valpo who wore light blue.  It’s a nice uniform, sky blue, reminds me of Manchester City.  Which reminds me there is only 5 weeks remaining until the start of the next English Premier League on 17 August.  Sadly, very few preseason games are coming to the US this year.  Unlike last year when we got together at Raven stadium in Baltimore to watch Liverpool and Tottenham mix it up.  But I digress, back to the game.  FC Valpo beat us in what was a strange game indeed.  We seemed to have backed away from all we’ve learned this year.  We moved back into our 1 sweeper, 1 stopper defense...which puts all the pressure on Jan.  We don’t seem to be passing as well as we have the past the last six months...we don’t even seem to be looking for passes.  It could be FC Valpo was just that good.  They were certainly fast...it was hard to complete a pass or receive a pass and look up without there being a field of sky blue all around.  So, I’m just gonna leave it at that.  FC Valpo good team...and unless we are firing on all cylinders there is very little we are going to do about it.  I’m not even sure what the final score was, but we did bag a single goal, which from the bench looked spectacular.  So there is that...  But what was even more interesting was what was happening on the bench.

Mooch, who is forever seemingly prone to injury, left the field when an FC Valpo player checked him in the shoulder.  It snapped his neck hard to the side.  As impacts go it was nowhere near the hit Ben took between the shoulder blades back in the spring, where the back of his head practically bounced off his spine.  But the hit Mooch took from the side was sufficient to throw his neck out of whack. He stood there practically paralyzed.  The ref indicated play-on because we gained the advantage and then he stopped play a few moment’s later when he saw that Mooch was unable to move.  The ref said he saw the hit, but due the the advantage, didn’t award the foul.  Mooch, in severe distress, hobbled off the field and sat in the bleachers.  Matt, who was having a bad day because he was suffering some muscle strains following his performance last week approached Mooch, in a deliberate but non-threatening manner.  As he drew near Mooch noticed Matt extending his hand toward his neck.  When someone moves their hand toward your throat that should generally trigger a defensive reaction, however Matt’s movements were not threatening, and Mooch was like an animal, when in severe distress, sensing that the human is there to help and allows that human to touch them, to release them from a snare, or to pull a thorn from their paw, for instance.  Also, Mooch had the knowledge that Matt is a Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine and did sense that he was there to help.  Despite the fact that Mooch couldn’t move his head since his neck was so locked up, had anyone else in the world made a move to touch his neck at that point, even his mother, he might have summoned one of the blocking move’s he learned in Kung Fu.  He did not and Matt landed his hand on the back of his neck.  Within moments Matt was having Mooch lift his arm and was applying and releasing pressure with his hand.  Then he had Mooch apply resistance pressure against his own pressure.  Quickly Matt had discovered the source of the kink and which one of the vertebrae in Mooch’s neck was pinching a nerve.  He then started a series of stretches on Mooch’s head and neck that almost immediately relieved the pressure.  Mooch’s neck was unlocked.  The pain was gone.  In fact, his head was so loose on his shoulders he commented that  he felt better than at the start of the game.  Mooch’s recovery was so fast and felt so good he returned to the match.  One week later, while sore for a couple of days, the kink never returned.  Early treatment seems to be key for these musculoskeletal  anomalies such as this...amazing.

So, we’ve discovered a secret weapon, keen to join the Orangemen family.  I guess I don’t care so much that we got clobbered by FC Valpo.  What an acquisition for Orange!  We must all take some time to thank Karl for recruiting him.  It feels like we now have our own physio on the team...who needs the assets of a Manchester United or Liverpool if we have our own quality medical care coming to play at our games.  Thanks Matt for joining us so quickly and bringing your family to our family...not to mention your soccer skills and skills as a doctor...we are gonna offer you a 5 year contract and have you sign with our team ASAP.  Forget that talk about being closer to Herndon or Chantilly...what the hell was I thinking!