Week 7
Week 8 is almost over and here I am talking about week 7, so let's hurry and catch up. This week's opponent was DLI. We have a past with DLI an incident to match the drama of our run in with Augustus. Way way back in season 2 we were playing DLI and one of their players started getting hot under the collar. Most of DLI's players are young fellers in the military so the testosterone tends to run a little high with them. Anyway, he started saying, "Rape 'em!" to his teammates. I guess he was actually urging them on to score more goals against and not actually rape us, although in this era of don't ask don't tell one can never be too sure. Well, Gunner Babe Autumn over heard said player making his comments and kindly asked him stop. Said player exited the field and continued on with his exhortations. Autumn reacted in much the same way as she did with August's lovely speech. Chaos ensued, the game was stopped, players got really really fired up and then things cooled down again. What made us especially angry was the lack of teammates trying to shut this guy up. In fact another player known to us as "The Young Brother", as coined by coach Z, joined right in with the offensive language. The offending player went so far as to tell Autumn, "You don't know who you're messing with!" before leaving the area for a short time before coming back in his truck, stopping it, jumping out, hopping a fence and almost starting a fight with Sal and his friend Eddie which would have become a free for all between both teams.
Unfortunately, the offending player did not know who he was messing with when he decided to tangle with our Gunner Babe Autumn. She contacted his CO and he got in a whole heap of trouble. Ever since the incident he has been sweet as pie, going so far as to show genuine concern over Coach Z's second concussion in Season 3. Also unfortunately nothing really happened to The Young Brother who continues to mouth off whenever we play DLI.
So you can say that I don't particularly like this team. You can also say that I am not in the minority on this one with respect to the rest of the team. This might explain my extreme bad mood on Sunday when we played DLI this season. It might also have stemmed from a long week at work or several other factors but regardless of the reasons I was just in a foul mood this game.
We had a game plan going into this one. We were going to lay back in the first half defensively and just focus on keeping DLI from scoring on us. Then in the second half we would come out, compress the field and try to mount some offense. We stuck to our game plan for about 5 minutes. Then we went straight to field compression and offside traps. We did well in that first half, holding DLI to four goals, two of which were directly my fault. Every goal but one resulted from a momentary glitch on our part. This DLI team is just really good with a lot of stand out players. Jacob took a terrible hit in the first half, knocking the wind out of him and aggravating his already injured knee (from last week's game). We felt pretty good going into the half. I felt especially good because I had laid a tremendous hit on The Young Brother during a corner kick and had stolen the ball from him a few times.
Now unbeknownst to me, your stalwart narrator, Dan had been making a steady stream of to number 14. 14 had told Dan to leave him alone but Dan kept it up in an attempt to rattle 14, who is arguably their best player and scored at least half of DLI's goals in this game. What happened was that Dan pissed off 14 and he began to harrass us back at the end of the first half and the entire second half. Since I was unaware of the psychological warfare being waged and was in a bad mood to boot. I got into with 14 as well until Chris G set me straight on the whole matter.
In the end 14 and The Young Brother both received yellow cards for running their mouths both to us and the referree (a bigger bunch of babies I have not seen!) and beat us by something like 12 or 14 to 1. Jacob managed to further injure his knee in the second half went out then subbed back in and injured his knee again. Jacob refused to go to the doctor initially but went on Monday. He has fluid in his knee, was given a giant knee stabilizing brace thing and is scheduled for an MRI next Friday. Needless to say he is on the injured reserve list for a while.
In other injured player news, Richard was out most of the week after having his achilles tendon operated on, Kristian showed up to practice on Tuesday but couldn't kick the ball with his left leg (he is left footed) his status for Sunday is questionable. Finally, Coach Z is still not allowed to play lest he suffer horrible brain damage from yet another concussion.
- posted by David @ 4/01/2004 07:31:00 PM