NSR Cup Semifinal vs Grand Rapids Crew Jrs

It was nice to make it through to the semifinals as group winners. I had no idea what to expect from this Grand Rapids Crew Juniors team with their ridiculous scores during the group phase. I was happy with our group play because each game had challenged us. As we warmed up I looked over at their team doing some one touch passing and I was impressed that all of the girls were keeping the ball on the ground with their toe up and ankle locked on all the passes. These girls might be pretty good I thought to myself.

Have you ever seen Billy Madison? Where Adam Sandler goes back to school and has to pass each grade in 2 weeks in order to win his dad’s hotel chain from the evil Erik Gordon. It all ends up coming down to an academic decathlon and one of the events is music. Gordon does an incredible violin solo and Billy follows it by failing horribly to play the clarinet (or some kind of wind instrument, I’m not sure what it was.) After a couple of notes that sound like a mule calling for help Sandler stops playing, laughs and says “He’s Good.”

That is how I felt during this game. We were both trying to play the same instrument but they were so much better. They were under control, had great vision and they made great runs. They were better than us.

About five minutes in they worked the ball down our left side and our midfielders dropped back into our box and occupied the same space as our defenders, leaving their mids wide open on top of the box. Most teams wont look at the players on top of the box when they are crossing and they will just hit it into the box and hope it gets to someone. Not these girls. Before their winger crossed the ball she looked up and spotted their center mid wide open just outside of the box and played a perfect ball to her. She took a touch and shot. It was a shot that AJ would stop 99 times out of 100 but this one got through her hands and ended up in the back of the net. They definitely deserved the goal, but I felt bad for AJ because of how it went in.

Immediately after it went in I remembered a conversation I had with AJ after the Eclipse game where I told her that no matter how another team scores on her, a great shot or a bad one, how she reacts affects our team. Remembering those words AJ got up right away got the ball out of the net and back up to midfield. While I knew she was upset she didn’t show it to her teammates, she just gave the look of someone who despite what had just happened she was going to be ok and it wasn’t going to happen again.

We escaped to half time the score with the score at 1-0.

At half time we talked about this game being the reason we come down to these events. We want to see teams like Grand Rapids so we can judge where we are. We talked about how we were going to react to playing a good team. Were we going to give up and let them destroy us like they had every other team in the tournament up until this point or were we going to come out and battle? We needed to raise our level of play to match theirs.

I elected to keep us in our 4-4-2 starting the second half knowing that we still needed to score and we hadn’t created many chances with just two forwards. I wanted to go to our 3-4-3 but I didn’t think we could defend well enough with just 3 defenders against their attack so I was hoping we could keep the score close for the first 15 minutes and then change it up for the last 15.

The second half was dominated again by Grand Rapids. But to our girls credit they never stopped fighting. Even though Grand Rapids had the lion’s share of the possession we were doing well to not give them many good opportunities. Ten minutes in they got their second goal. We had possession in their half, but I told our center defender to get closer to our weak side defender because while our weak side defender is a good player, she is not going to win a foot race with Grand Rapids fast forwards. Our center defender could. But she did not move over quickly enough, we lost the ball and it was played long to their forward who raced by our weak side defender and put in the second goal. A great learning experience for our girls.

* * * *You have to know what your strength’s are and you cannot be afraid to ask for help from your teammates.

* * * *

20 minutes in they scored a great third goal that was the culmination of great off the ball movement and a finish that ended up in the roof of our net. Great goal.

We had switched to our 3-4-3 by that point and we were getting a couple shots from distance but nothing to spectacular. The game finished 3-0.

After the game we talked to the players and parents, reiterating the fact that this game is why we come down here. We need to see where we are at and be able to set goals to strive for. Winning tournaments is great, but losing some games seems to put a little more glare your weaknesses and in doing so it gives you good reminders of what we need to work on.

We predicted that Grand Rapids would end up winning the final by a score of 6-0 over the Strikers and we were close. It ended 5-0. Congrats to them on a great tournament.