Week 5
Please forgive me, oh so gentle reader. I'm pretty late with this post. Since most of you only read this during the week, you will probably read this post and the post for this week's game at the same time, oh well.

We were graced with the presence of longtime blog reader John W. at this game against Monterey United. We played a man down, only having 10 men there, we picked up a new player, Andrew, not to be confused with the Andrew H on Inujured Reserve.

The fans were given an extra special treat as yours truly played forward for the entire game. My grace, speed and agility were not enough to put the ball in the net, however as I was all alone up front. We put up a valiant effort, holding MU to no goals in the first half.

It looked like we were on our way to a tie ball game when, late in the second half, there was a mighty strange call by the ref. One of our defenders, Ernst, was going for a 50/50 ball (a ball in the air that two players are attempting to head or trap), he put his arms around the other player going for the ball and was called for the penalty, rightly so. Unfortunately, the other player, who, I was told later had been pretty physical the whole game, decided to throw a punch at Ernst. Ernst backed off and asked the guy, "What the hell are you doing?" and he was visibly upset. The ref decided that a good thing to do would be to give Ernst a yellow card. When Ernst protested, the ref told him to take a 5 minute break.

Now, as any of my millions of world wide regular blog readers knows, I am not a zealot about this team or this league, but for heaven's sake! That is not even a rule, the ref can't make a player leave the field for a "break". The only way a ref can make a player leave the field is by issuing them a red card or to send them off to fix a uniform/equipment problem. What this idiot ref did was to put us two men down in a tie game, late in the second half. To make matters worse, while our team was still trying to sort out this completely unorthodox interpretation of the rules, play resumed without a whistle. Monterey U put the ball in the net and that completely took the wind out of our sails.

They wound up scoring twice more finishing the game 3 to 0. Ernst was so disgusted he never came back on the field.
- posted by David @ 4/11/2005 08:26:00 PM