To the superficial observer, the fact that we lost 5-1 might seem like, you know, a bad thing. But I want to go all “glass-half-full” on this deal, and point out the upsides:
* Though we scored half as many goals as last week, we gave up one less goal. Defense wins championships, people, and we’re making measurable strides.
* For 45 minutes, we’re hell on wheels. With no training camp or pre-season, our group conditioning is less than optimum, true. But for a bunch of guys who are out-of-shape, not to mention relative strangers, we played a really good first half.
* Personally, thanks to the miracle of albuterol, I was breathing better, and I was needing to sub-off less than last week.
* Our goalkeeper made some serious highlight-reel quality saves. And he didn’t even get really pissed off when we started defending like a really bad U-6 team there late in the 2nd half.
* It looked like the rest of the guys had as much fun as I did, and I had almost too much fun. Good guys, good weather, (some) good soccer. I don’t know if you can ask for much more than that in this life.
The only real complaint I have is that I really wanted to play in an over-30 league, but it seems we’ve been merged into Division 3, due to a lack of over-30 guys signing up. To compensate, there needs to be some sort of by-law in this league limiting the number of players with flat bellies to a bare minimum. It just ain’t fair.
