RLC vs East Central College

Yesterday was a beautiful day for soccer. The morning temperature was in the 50's and by game time it had climbed to the upper 70's. We had plenty of sunshine so it made for a great day for soccer.

This was our first meeting with East Central College. I received a call from Coach Bobby Peters back in the spring about putting a match together. So we settled on a date and agreed to a home match with them. Coach Peters is in his third year as the head coach and he has put together a good program.

I did a little research on them and found that they had played some teams just as close as we had played them so I figured that we were in for an even match. My estimation proved to be true.

We started out the match on a good note. We played well and had two very good chances to go ahead early but our chances didn't produce the goals that we wanted. East Central struck first. It was a very unexpected goal. One of their players struck the ball about 35 yards out. It wasn't a hard shot, but it was a low shot that looked as if it was going wide right of the frame. Instead it hit the lower right corner and ricocheted in the goal, just outside the reach of Timmy. We played the rest of the half equal and when the first 45 minutes expired we were down 1-0.

At the half I told the boys that I wasn't aware of any part of our game that needed to be adjusted. Aside from the fact that we still are not disciplined enough to possess the ball in the last portion of our middle third and the first part of our attacking third, we played a very good first half. Timmy made some key saves, and our boys played hard. I couldn't ask for more from my players than they gave me. We wanted to go out in the second half and square the game up early so that we could settle in and play a controlled game the rest of the half. But they scored again, and we found ourselves down 2-0.

The Warriors kept battling, and in the 82nd minute Rocky found the back of the net. 2-1 looks a lot better than 2-0. With 8 minutes remaining our boys poured it on. They pulled out all the stops and battled intensly until the horn went off. Neil Houlihan missed a goal by inches as he banged a header off the side post, and a few other boys had good chances to even the score, but it wasn't meant to be.

This was one of those games where I felt that we won the battle but lost the war. Both teams had some very good goal scoring opportunities, and both teams played possesion ball. Maybe I'm biased, but I think we had the edge in possesion and goal scoring opportunites. In the end, we congratulated ECC for a well played game. I look forward to traveling to their place next year to even the score...:-)