A great win even without lateral movement

We did not see a game report in a while. Everybody is too busy with developing Rome. But the win this week deserves an entry. We were beating Citicars 8-4 with a great performance.

Expectations were not too high before the game. We were missing some of our most experienced players. Striker Attila was out for keeping the servers up and running. Joe was still working on the lateral movements of his legs which suffered from an injury couple weeks ago. But goalie Kevin J holds now the 'excuse of the season': he could not play because he still had to recover from his hike up to Mt Diablo on Sunday. There was still no lateral movement or any movement whatsoever in his legs on game day, and we don't know when there will be. We all hope soon.

But we got Seamus back who just returned from Yosemite Park, where he went up Half-Dome to cure his knee injury after missing the last games. And that cure seemed to work well. So, Half-Dome is definitely a better hike than Mt Diablo for soccer players. We also had a big revival of Salva, who played his first game of the season. Salva jumped in as goalie and did a great job. And we called 2 rookies Geoff Stafford and Samir Gulati for the game, so that we had a full squad.

There were many changes on the roster. But it turned out to be our best performance of the season. Our defense (Seamus, Jon, and Frank) was rock-solid as usual. The midfield did not give up any space. Mark was running up and down like a marathon man. We quickly turned around most of Citicars' offensive attempts. Salva in goal did the rest the few times the Citicars strikers got to far. And our offense was a constant threat. Ralf led one attack after another and by halftime we were up 4-0 with 3 goals from Armin and 1 goal from Jon.

The game got rougher in the 2nd half. A 2-minute penalty for Seamus gave Citicars finally the opportunity to score their first goal. Citicars kept on the pressure and scored some more. But our team did not let it go and kept the lead with some beautiful goals. Thomas and Jon hammered the ball into the net and Mark finished a solo run. But we kept the best goal for the end: in the last minute, we had a great combination from Thomas to Armin to Ralf, who kicked the ball into the lower right corner to finish a great win.

At the end, it was 8-4 on the scoreboard. Samir had a good start in his first game and we finally have a player from the Financials development team on the field. The other rookie Geoff showed some improvements as well in his new shiny soccer shoes. But player of the match was definitely Armin, who scored 3 goals and had 2 assists.

We are looking forward to the playoffs with that win. Last session, we were trying to avoid the Citicars team in the playoffs, where we had to suffer a painful loss and an unsatisfactory tie in the regular season. This session, we are trying to let Citicars not even get to the playoffs. Knowing that our injured players soon get their lateral movements back, we are aiming to finish the regular season in first place and we should not have to fear any opponent in the playoffs.