Back from the dead - Week 1
Yes, I'm back.

What happened in between the last post and now? Well toward the end of season 4 I suffered a herniated disc. Out of commission for like 2 months. Had to have surgery. Terrible, terrible stuff. I checked with the doctor and he said that I just am predisposed to getting herniated discs. So I started walking and then, after a couple of months, weight training. Then jogging and after about three months, I was feeling pretty good, I had lost some weight, I was in much better shape and it looked like I was going to hit this season in the best shape of my soccer playing career. Then I went to Vegas. Stopped working out. Put the weight back on and have started this season in just about as bad of shape as I was in when we started season 1.

Fear not, gentle reader, for tomorrow I hit the gym! I will be in much better shape in just a few weeks and be able to hopefully stay out on the field for more than 2 to 5 minutes at a time!

Now for this week's game. We had 14 players show up initially. We played DLI. Now I know long time readers of the blog may remember DLI as a problem team in past encounters. Last season, even though I was not reporting on these pages, there was a bit of a fist fight between the Gunners...okay between Dan and the DLI team. But this is an almost completely different set of folks for DLI. Where the last team were a bunch of individually talented jerks, this team seemed much nicer and also not so talented individually.

However, these are military folks playing against a bunch of desk jockies and some English pub owner/goers. These DLI guys run every day. Needless to say the people on our team don't. We were in terrible shape. I think we were a more skilled team overall but by the end of the first half it was apparent that our gas tanks are much too small.

Here's the breakdown. First half we had several opportunities including one by yours truly. If only I were a couple of steps faster I could have gotten to a ball which bounced off the goalie but oh well (that's right I played a little forward today!) Eventually, the DLI folks scored toward the end of the half and scored again shortly after that. We were unable to capitalize on any of our opportunities and were scoreless.

The Brit guys decided that we might need to have a lineup in the second half, Dan had done his usual bang up job of not really telling anyone where they were playing before the game, leaving up to everyone to sort of sort it out. We played a 4-3-3 for the second half. One of our subs had gone missing by this point but he was replaced later by Cisco who showed up toward the end of the game.

DLI scored 3 more times in the second half, making it a 5 -0 victory for them. And it was painfully obvious that we need to be in better shape.

I played a little full back in the second half, with a couple of steals and drawing a foul to my credit. I also finished up the game playing a little forward. The other team was incredibly scared of my speed and soccer skills. Especially after I went through great pains to let them know just how good I was. They responded with a little psychological warfare of their own and didn't really mark up on me as if I posed no threat. But of course, I'm sure they were all keeping their eyes on me and there would have been like a quintuple team on me if my own lame team had just passed me the ball.

It's been a couple of hours now and my shins and back hurt but overall I think I'm doing all right.

More to come, so tell your friends, cause the show's started up again!
- posted by David @ 2/27/2005 05:35:00 PM