A Few Firsts

The good...

Saturday we picked up another win (4-1) including the first hat-trick (3 goals by one player) of the season. Our opponent only had 10 players so we played 10 v. 10 and had numerous attacks on the goal early and often that fell short, or wide, or right to their goalie. We did manage, however, to score three times before half time. To start the second half, we shuffled up our line-up to get our all-girls attack going again. With that line-up we managed a couple good strikes, but no goals to show for it. Later in the half one of our forwards recorded his third goal of the game to secure the win for us.

The bad...

About half way through the second half our fullbacks (playing too far forward) let an attack through and our keeper was about 6 inches away from a save and - unfortunately - allowed the first goal of the season against us. Final score: 4-1

The ugly...

Tonight we played the other undefeated team in our conference (who also happens to be the only team to beat us last year- but whom we defeated in the conference championship game) and we played flat. We gave up a goal within the first 5 minutes but battled back to even the game scoring before the 15 minute mark. We were not able to get many good attacks going and our defense was kept very busy and unfortunately allowed another goal one minute before halftime.

Trailing 2-1 was not a big deal, but giving up two quick goals in the first 5 minutes of the second half was. Shortly after that we gave up a goal on a Penalty Kick that our keeper made a great save on- only he was standing six inches behind the goal line. Our opponent scored a couple more for good measure before we managed one more goal before falling 6-2.

The silver lining...

We were the first team this year to score on this team and we scored twice. AND - if we win our last conference game (next week) we will get a rematch in the conference championship game.

This is probably (hopefully) one of those "good times" to lose as it helped our kids get a better picture of just how good we really are and how much we need to and can still improve in our last 2+ weeks of the season. Our kids were already talking about wanting to play this team again, hopefully they will back that up with some hard work the next couple of weeks.