1-3 Loss vs. Grace's Body Shop

August 3rd, 2003

Mike:
By the way, they are called Grace's Body Shop. I received a total of Zero offers for discounts on body work from their team members though.

Brian:
What was their name? I can't remember right now, but they were at the top of the B-division. Since I don't have a net connection while I write this, we'll just refer to them as TOT, for the other team.

Mike prepared us for a tough game by recruiting fine subs - Dan, Rebecca, Santosh (sp?) and Steve made their debut, alongside Barbara, who is hopefully now a regular too.

TOT came out strong, and quickly showed that they had a combination of fast forwards, good women, and great passing between all of them. We did manage some early chances, and the skills of our subs were a welcome addition. However, they began their run-and-gun offense early. We caught them offsides quite a bit, notes Jeannette. But they eventually managed a cross that took a funny hop and we ended up deflecting it into our own goal. Unlucky.

We fought back hard though, and kept pressuring their defense, which looked a bit shaky at times. Good pressure from our wingers, and great hustle in the midfield (DiCarlo, Erin, Barbara, and Vasey) to get to quite a few loose balls on the ground. The general opinion, though, was that we didn't get to enough balls in the air.

The pressure did pay off. A nice feed from Erin to Santosh, who then fed Susan for a nice low shot to the corner to score. Santosh felt relieved, having just not quite been able to twist the right way to finish a cross a minute or two earlier. Well done forwards. The game remained tied until halftime.

The second half was similar, though I like to think we got to more of the loose balls. Their offensive pressure seemed greater though. Many times we were saved by great efforts from Clark and Mike. Rebecca and Vasey ran hard on right D to keep up with one of their fast winger-guys.

Ultimately their skills proved too much. A beautiful cross from their winger girl to the man that Brian should have been marking led to their second goal. (Mike:Brian or Mike or Rebecca) Mike said I shouldn't take the blame, so I'll blame Ramsey for being on vacation.

Still we fought back. Some nice offensive opportunities, but not a lot of luck. Given that many of the forwards had not played together, we did pretty well.

They kept up some pressure, and after a series of minor mistakes made a nice cross again to almost duplicate the second goal. Too bad, but they just outplayed us again on that one. Yep, Ramsey would have made the difference too perhaps.

After that we managed to hold them. We turned up the pressure a bit at the end, but couldn't quite finish anything. A few not-so-great calls frustrated us, but the other team were generally a good bunch. All-in-all, great job team. This could have been 6-0, but we played hard and never quit. Let's come back next week and play as hard.

Mike:
I also wanted to point out that we had a rare opportunity to actually watch Clark make some saves. I had sort of forgotten that Clark was capable of making more than two saves a game (since that's all he usually has to make), and it was quite pleasant to see Clark save about a dozen hard shots from about 20 yards out or so.

Hit of the game goes that that mean unsportsmanlike woman who totally took DiCarlo out for no reason after he cleanly beat her to the ball, then did his best to avoid him. In fairness DiCarlo should probably bulk up a bit.

I thought we played really well for most of the game, with the exception of getting a little tired towards the end, but what can you do? We could easily have had a couple more goals if we had gotten a little luckier, and I thought we made a great showing against one of the top teams in the B division. Maybe it's a good thing we didn't do any better or they'd force us to play up there next year!

Finally, I award play of the game to Me, for that clearance on the side where I really whacked the ball into that Ugly-Ass black Dodge Durango on the sidelines. Man that felt good!

Scoring:

Susan from Santosh and Erin

Cheering:

Julie
Dan's Wife, who's name I embarassingly forget