Yes, this happened in August and here I am in late November writing about it but I meant to write about this a long time ago and had my ideas laid out beforehand, but apologies for not getting it out sooner.
It was interesting being part of that Academy. I enjoyed it and recommend people try to get in and get feedback. It was a brutally hot weekend so other than my first match on Saturday where I was the center, all matches had a water break which shorted play even more.
But the match I wanted to focus on was the doozy of a match that I did at 8am on Saturday. It was an over 40 match so I thought it wouldn't be that good of a match. I knew one of the teams somewhat since they play in Northern VA but I wasn't prepared for the onslaught of goals. I guess because the field was relatively small and these guys knew what they were doing, it was a great match.
The game started out tame enough but escalated quickly. We had two quick goals, one from each team and then came one of those match critical plays. Yellow crosses the ball from my right side and as it bounces at the penalty spot, an attacker and defender are jostling for when the ball comes down again. The attacker does a spin move of sorts and the defender does the "sliding pic" or "pick" play that I used to do in basketball growing up and blocks him out but the ball is not there yet and they topple over. PK for yellow and black is angry when I also card the defender.
Later in the game, yellow up 5-2 and we had a moment where had there not been a precedent set by the pros then it would have been a hard sell. Yellow keeper collects the ball on a cross from black. Black is retreating out of the box and yellow keeper distributes the ball to a yellow defender but a black attacker sticks out his foot and collects the ball, passes to a teammate who scores on an empty net. Yellow goes crazy, and all I had to say was that it was exactly what happened in the final between Real Madrid and Liverpool not 2 months ago. Everyone knew what I was talking about and accepted it. Had that not happened, it would have been a harder sell.
In the end, Black pulled out a fantastic comeback to win 6-5 after being down 5-2 with 25 minutes left to play. The feedback I got was that I needed to anticipate more the play instead of reacting and that my substitution procedure was fantastic until the last sub opportunity where we lost track of one and yellow played for a short time with 12.
The rest of the clinic was good. I would certainly do it again if they continue to have it. I also had the center for the final of the open competition, in what looked to be one of the "marquee" matchups. However, the game was over almost before it started. One team was riddled with injuries and the other team jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first 5-6 minutes and then played keepaway. It didn't help that it was so hot that we had to do 2 water breaks per half.
More to come in the next couple of days now that activity for soccer has slowed down a bit (though I have a match on Sunday, where the high is going to be 37, not looking forward to it!).
