SCOTLAND YARD NEWS: Adrian Game
Monday, October 15, 2007Written by: Jason Stanley, Assistant Coach
Training went well last week with a tough series of 9 v 9 games on Thursday and some finishing and ball work on Friday on the artificial turf of the football stadium in preparation for our game at Adrian’s turf facility on Saturday. Mark Daisy was returning from his hip-flexor injury so we found ourselves with a relatively healthy squad, especially given the time of year.
We traveled down to Adrian and had a tough one, to say the least. Saturday’s loss was particularly difficult for me because I felt like I could see it coming. We had beaten Adrian 6-1 earlier in the year here at home, but knew they were a much better side than the result would have indicated. And, we knew several other things going into Saturday’s match: we were playing on a turf field against a speedy opponent, we were playing a team that was not happy about the previous result, and we were on the road where we have had trouble scoring all year.
We knew all of these things, had talked about them all week leading up to the game, and had prepared ourselves at training on Thursday and Friday with them in mind. Yet, when it came down to it on Saturday, we seemed unaware of these factors and were beaten by a team that executed their game plan more efficiently and wanted the victory more. Did we play particularly bad? No. There was certainly some good play by us. But, after an up and down first half and a 0-0 score, we were unable to make the simple adjustments that we discussed at halftime and ultimately found ourselves on the bad end of a 2-0 score line. We did have some good chances in the last 10-12 minutes, but it just proved to be too little too late.
Saturday’s game has left us with a gut check to see how we will respond and finish out the last 6 conference matches of the season. We have an extremely important game at home on Wednesday against Tri-State, who we tied 0-0 on the road earlier in the year. We are then on the road at Kalamazoo on Saturday in an equally important game.
Sunday’s reserve game at Northwood was canceled. The reserves will travel to Muskegon on Friday to play at 4 pm. We will be trying our best to reschedule with Northwood for later in the month to get another game in for the reserve side.
Posted: Wed, October 17th, 2007 at 12:11AM
