Corwin had another soccer game today. This was against sort of the same team as last week, but in the 5th-6th version.
The game started out well, although the opponents were definitely playing better soccer. It wasn’t anything big but they tended to win player enouncters more often and (IMHO) clearly had more hustle, those two things probably being related. Still, Corwin’s team stayed in the game. Corwin had several good kicks — he’s doing much better about not only getting distance but putting the ball in a good position for teammates. However, the offense wasn’t quite as aggressive as it needed to be. They had lots of good kicks in to the pocket with no one to receive it, so the opposing keeper would just pick it up and boot it back downfield. Jack did have one very nice shot that bounced off the bottom of the cross bar — just an inch or two lower and it would have been unstoppable.
Part way through the second quarter the opponents scored on a good kick and the half ended with the score just 0-1.
The third quarter started out about the same but about half way through that the opposing keeper missed an easy stop. It was a long kick from outside in to the pocket with, again, no friendlies to assist and it looked like the keeper would just catch and boot it. But for whatever reason it just slipped through his fingers and in to the goal. This seemed to energy Corwin’s team and demoralize their opponents — Corwin’s definitely took the upper hand and early in the fourth quarter they had a space of 2 or 3 minutes where they kept enormous pressure on the keeper, with attackers deep in the goal box and very successful returns whenever the opponents would boot it out. Eventually the siege was broken but immediately afterward there was another long kick that the keeper missed. I suspect he was just frazzled.
Corwin’s team keep their upper hand on field position for the rest of the game, but with just a minute or two to play the opponents made a break away play and got a score on what I think was rather a weak kick, but since Corwin’s team had scored twice on less than stellar goal keeping, it was hard to complain. That left the game a tie at 2-2 with no further scoring. Interesting, this time (as opposed to two game ago) it seemed a good result, rather than a bad one to the kids
There was a lot of tripping over the ball for some reason. Jack tripped at least three times and the other team lost an excellent chance at a score when the attacker tripped over the ball.
