USA Cup: Day Two

Well, Day Two. Our opponent today is New Brighton. They beat what appeared to be a better Edina team 4-2 yesterday so I was curious to see how they would look against us. Before I get to that, I did check out the Brazil-Edina game which took place just before our game. Brazil looked much, much sharper than they did against us. When they went up 3-1 just before halftime, I packed my stuff to head to our game. Edina had looked shaky, especially their keeper and defense which resulted in a final score of 5-2 in favor of Brazil.

Our game started off with some great news. The player who had rolled his ankle Monday night showed up on crutches and said that he might be able to play Friday if the swelling goes down. He had his ankle examined and there was nothing broken or strained; just swollen. I immediately told him to sit down and start icing it. :)

The game started off very well. We absolutely dominated play. New Brighton was small physically and we seemed to run circles around them. One of our strikers, who is blessed with some serious wheels, wreaked havoc by consistently beating their wing defenders and creating scoring chances.

About halfway through the half, we had a corner kick which, once again, was well placed. One of our center mids ran onto it and headed home a nice goal to put us up 1-0. Very soon after that,
our speedy striker slotted home a breakaway after blowing past two defenders. 2-0 good guys.

The only other thing to mention about the first half is that clouds started to roll in. At halftime, the ref came over to cover the severe weather scenarios and how they could affect the game. When the second half was set to start, the ref immediately called the game as there was a bolt of lighting off in the distance.

After a brief discussion with the Cup organizers, play was suspended and the scores of any games that had reached halftime would become final scores. On one hand, that's great for us because we get a 2-0 victory and our players don't have to play another half of soccer. On the other hand, it's terrible because with another half of play we could have potentially scored a few more goals to help our goal differential in the standings. (Yes, obviously the opposite could be true too - maybe we would have lost!)

Regardless, the boys played really well and were in very good spirits after the game. Hopefully we'll keep playing well!

The Group D standings after Day Two are:

Brazil 1-0-1 (6 goals for, 3 against)
IGH Heat 1-0-1 (3 goals for, 1 against)
New Brighton 1-1-0 (4 goals for, 4 against)
Edina 0-2-0 (4 goals for, 9 against)

Tomorrow: Edina!