St Cloud Friendlies Game #1 vs Mequon
Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 04:47PM I arrived up in St Cloud last night so I would be able to be at the dome at 7:00am to set up the Hi-Pod for the day's games. Jim Niemann was meeting me there with one of his U18 players and we were using the Hi-Pod as a fundraiser for their team.
The first game was at 7:30 so we had plenty of time to set up the Hi-Pod but as we started to set it up, everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. First the monitor where you watch what is being filmed would not turn on. We spent 15 minutes working on that until we decided it was officially broken. Luckily Jim had a monitor from his car that they use to watch dvd's on that looked like it might work, but in order for that to happen Jim had to make a trip to Walmart to get a converter. 20 minutes later Jim was back with the pieces. Another 15 minutes with electrical tape, extension cords, and the converter we were ready to go with the monitor.
We sent the camera up only to find that Jim's HD camera's remote was not working. Of course everything had worked on Wednesday and Thursday when we checked over everything, but come crunch time all we were missing was circus music to go with our side line spectacle.
Down came the camera. We moved the Hi Pod closer to the middle of the field. Adjusted the zoom and sent the camera back up. We didn't like the zoom, again, so we brought the camera back down. Adjusted the zoom and 10 minutes into the 2nd game of the day we were good to go.
I had originally planned on going home after the Hi-Pod was set up and running but the 14 Blues were playing in that 2nd game so I stayed to watch them play. Each time I watch them I am amazed at how much they have improved. They are so much more dangerous this year. I think they put up 9 goals on Dakota Gold's 15 team.
Shortly after that the 15 Whites were playing, so I stayed and watched that. This happened over and over again so I ended up staying at the dome the entire day.
I was able to watch the 13 Whites play Mequon. The game went back and forth and the White team was able to score once and win 1-0. When Mequon was in control of the game they sent numbers forward and played decent. But when the White team was in control they kept almost everybody back to defend.
At 6:45pm it was finally our turn to play. For today's game we would be without Stoker and Bella and we had Babo from Mark's 12's playing up with us.
We started out in our 4-3-3. Right from the opening whistle we showed tons of skill on the ball. The girls did lots of moves. We knocked the ball around very nicely with lots of combinations. The only issue was that we did all of this in our half with out looking to go forward.
Each time the girls received the ball they would try to beat a defender no matter where they were or how many people were around them. We were very calm on the ball. During the game we had a couple of spells where we played keep away in our box with our defenders and AJ against their forwards. Each time the ball went to AJ and she waited to draw their forwards in I was screaming inside my head for her to play it. But each time she would release the ball at the last second to one of our defenders and we kept possession of the ball.
It was cool to see how confident the girls were on the ball, but we definitely needed to address whether or not we had a purpose for the skill we were showing. At half time, this was all we talked about. We needed to get the ball into our attacking half. That way we would be using our skill to create scoring chances as opposed to using our skill to show that we had skill.
I encouraged our defenders to find our forwards feet as quickly as possible each time they received the ball. This would become our main focus for the weekend. Playing 25-40 yard passes to our forwards feet. I didn't want them to simply get the ball and send it long. I wanted them to play feet. It would be a challenge for our forwards to find the passing lanes and for our defenders to get their heads up early enough to find them.
The second half we did a much better job of getting the ball to our forwards and we played the entire second half in Mequon's end. But, we found it really difficult to create a lot of quality scoring chances since Mequon kept 10-11 players behind the ball. We have done almost all of our training this winter dealing with transition play, so facing a situation where there was no transition(due to us having the ball almost the entire game) we were a bit lost.
Our formation also did not help because without wide players up in the attack we were not able to get around the outside of Mequon to cross the ball and create chances that way.
In the end we were able to create a couple of chances but nothing went in and the game ended tied 0-0. Disappointing result? Not really. This was our 4th game since the beginning of December and we showed tons of skill on the ball while being under pressure. Had we scored a goal or two nothing would have changed. We still would have needed to recognize how to use our skill to be creative and we still would need to move the ball up field quicker. We talked briefly after the game and I would address it more tomorrow with the girls about what creativity really is.
I am fairly confident as well that tomorrow we would be a different team. The game against the 14's will see us improve a lot based on how we improved in our last set of back to back games in November. Plus, the girls pick up ideas very quickly. Another thing that will be in our favor with tomorrow's game, is that it will be a lot more wide open and we will be able to use our transition game to our advantage. I am looking forward to it.
