NSR Gold Cup Game #2 vs Eclipse Select

NSR Gold Cup Day 2

It was a busy day of soccer today with all four of our teams each having two games, meaning that between Mark and me, we would be coaching 8 games today. Spader, the guy who sets up all the NSR events and runs National Soccer Ranking, does a great job of working with our teams so Mark and I are always able to cover the games between the two of us.

My first game of the day was with our South U12’s against Eclipse Select East. I was interested to see how the girls would come out in this game after having a rough first game. Eclipse had won their first game by a score of 4-0. Much to my delight the girls came out strong and scored early off a corner kick. Then Eclipse scored two goals and I kept hearing negative statements from the girls on the sidelines. Saying things like, “Oh, it’s over now.” and “Here we go again.” I can’t stand statements like these. It takes all the energy out of a team even if it is just one player saying it.

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You have to always have the belief that no matter what happens you can come back. Always expect the best things to happen for you. If they aren’t happening at this moment, you have to believe that your fortunes will be changing shortly.

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After speaking to the girls about this we won a corner kick with no time left in the half and scored the tying goal. We took the lead off another corner kick in the second half. We had 3 corners and we scored 3 goals, incredible. Eclipse ended up tying the game up and we finished the game tied 3-3. A very good game and a good battle for the South girls.

Next it was off to the East U12 game against Eclipse Select, this is the home base program for Eclipse based out of Libertyville. I was fairly confident going into the game after watching Eclipse get handled rather easily in the first half of their game that I watched yesterday. While watching their game I hadn’t seen anyone who stood out or any particular strengths that I felt we needed to watch out for. I decided to start the girls in the 4-3-3 formation with the hope that our defenders and midfielders would continue to learn how to operate with no outside mids.

The game began in a back and forth fashion until Eclipse began to dominate us in the air. Every single time we had a goal kick or a punt they won the ball and kept us in our end. I feel that we are pretty good in the air and we have 7 girls who are strong headers of the ball, but the girls just didn’t seem to understand how important it was to win the aerial battles. Everyone was looking for someone else to do the work and then they would pick up the pieces. That cannot happen at this level. Everyone has to put in the work all the time.

We were also struggling with our marking. Eclipse would come forward in waves and no body on our team wanted to step up and direct our team. Because of this our girls were defending individually against a very good team . . . A much different team than I saw yesterday. Darn 12 year olds, why can’t they be consistent from day to day?

Anyways, around the 16^th minute our poor marking led to a partial clearance that sent the ball high in the air out to the side of our box. Gaffer went up for the header but she misjudged it slightly and the ball missed her head and hit her hand. The ref blew for a penalty. It was a soft call since the ball wasn’t going to goal and there was no one around her in a dangerous position to get the ball after she missed it, but it was a penalty nonetheless. Their girl stepped up to take the penalty and the ref asked her to hold on, as he wanted the girls to get outside of the arc on top of the box. The only problem was that there was no arc. Curiously instead of just guessing where the arc would be he let the girls start right behind the penalty taker. I thought this would be good for us since it might make the shooter more nervous, but she stepped up and struck the penalty well low to the left side of the goal. AJ barely got a finger to it, but the ball was hit well and went into the back of our net to put us down 1-0.

The rest of the half was controlled by Eclipse as we struggled to get any kind of rhythm going and continued to have problems marking up. We did well enough defensively to not give up many dangerous chances, but at half time we could feel lucky to only be down one goal.

Half Time Points

-Someone needs to take control in back and get us marked up. Communication is key and it has to be done all the time since the game is always changing.

-We are getting killed in the air. They are winning everything and trapping us in our end. We need to get to where the punts and goal kicks are going to go to and win the ball.

-They were playing with a sweeper and she was getting everything that we were playing long. We need one of our forwards to always be close enough to the sweeper so we can beat her to any ball.

-We are not out of this game. Come out and battle hard, win the air battles, communicate and things will start going our way.

The second half started and we had a good game on our hands. I was happy to see that our girls had not gotten down after the first half. The game was played in the midfield but again we struggled to find any rhythm offensively because we were rushed and we were only looking to play the ball long to our forwards. In the 51^st minute Eclipse won a throw in on our right hand side. They had a girl who could do very good flip throws and she tossed it all the way into our 6-yard box. Our outside mid who had started out marked up had turned her back on the girl she was defending and did not see her make a quick dash to the ball and tap it in for their second goal.

It stinks to get scored on and put us in a 2-0 hole, but inside I was very happy that Eclipsed actually capitalized on this cross. Our marking had been poor all game and watching them score on us drives home the point of why it is so important to face up the field while marking so you can see both the ball and your player. Going down 2 goals also put this team in a situation that they have rarely been in and I wanted to see how we would react.

We reacted brilliantly. For the first time all game we started to pass the ball around a bit and two minutes after they scored we were on the board. LK won the ball deep in our half and played a great one two with Jordy. LK then hit a one time ball for Sonic (Maddie B), who was deep with their sweeper thus giving us a chance to hit her for the through ball. She went in on the goalie and tucked a nice shot on the ground under the sliding keeper. It was excellent.

With 3 minutes left we won a free kick from about 20 yards outside the box. It was too far out to shoot it so I told Rickey to get everyone lined up on the far side of the box and she should chip it in just outside the six-yard box. She hit a perfect chip, she told me later that the reason it was so perfect was that she fell down as she was hitting it, gotta love the honesty. We timed our runs perfectly and Jordy almost connected on a volley after she broke free from her defender. The shot ended up going just wide. The final score was

2-1 in favor of the Eclipse.

The girls were upset that they lost. I was happy because I knew that us losing this game would drive home the point about needing to mark up properly all the time. At this level you can lose a game if you are not doing things perfectly all the time. I guarantee that if we had ended up tying that game the importance of marking would be lost on the girls since everything had turned out ok. After the game I made sure the girls thought about how they felt and asked them if they wanted to feel that way again. If they wanted to feel this way again in the future because they had not been mentally tuned in and let their mark get away from them for the goal that put us behind. Then I told them that I don’t blame the girl who let her mark get away from her. I blame everyone else on the field and on the bench, including myself, for not making sure that she was marking correctly. We either have everyone doing things correctly on the field or it is the team’s fault.

Then I asked the girls to think about how they felt after they went down 2-0. I asked them if they had felt that the game was over. They said they felt that they could still win even though they were down 2 goals with less than 10 minutes left. I agreed with them and they showed it in their play. The last 10 minutes showed great determination by the girls. That is the thing I love the most about this group. They always battle. They always believe they can win. I told them to remember that feeling and use it anytime things are not going their way.

I then informed the girls about the importance of their shutout yesterday and how important it was that they did not fold after the second goal today because if we were to win our second game we could still win the group based on goal differential. After two games the standings looked like this:

Team Wins Losses GF GA

Sirens 2 0 6 2

Bangu 1 1 4 2

Eclipse 1 1 3 6

Kickers0 2 0 4

If we beat the Sirens by two goals or more we would automatically advance. If we won we had a chance to get the wild card spot. But I had no time to dwell on those fun details; I had another game to coach. Man do I love these days filled with games all day long.