przed

It's cup weekend for Ros' soccer team. The group round finished up today. On Thursday and today we played the other three teams in our group. The top two teams go on to the semis tomorrow against the top two teams from the other group. And the final is tomorrow afternoon.

We won our first two games pretty handily, 0 - 7 and 6 - 0 respectively. The girls were all playing well and figured out how best to play against the two teams fairly quickly. Ros and one other girl have settled in as our main goalies, and they both did a bang up job keeping the goals out.

This afternoon we hit a much harder team. They'd already beaten us once this season, though on a day when we were missing a couple of key players. And for the first half today they ran all over us. We were down 0 - 3 in the first half. Ros was the goalie for the first half, and though she made some really great saves, they managed to completely leave our defence in the dust and get around her for those three goals. The one goal we did manage in the first half was disallowed because it went out of bounds first and bounced back in off the back of the goal post.

To say we were all nervous at the start of the second half was an understatement.

But the girls managed to claw their way back. They kept the ball in the opposition's end for most of the half, and they managed to stay on top of them whenever they got into our end. The other team had this one girl who was a head taller than even the tallest girl on our squad, looked more than a bit like a valkyrie, and managed to strip the ball off our girls whenever they came near her, so I managed to convince everyone to pass the ball if they saw her coming. And our best scorers finally figured out how to get past their defence, and our second goalie managed to stop absolutely everything that came her way.

In the end, we managed a 3 - 3 tie. And since we had a much higher goal differential, 13 to their 5, we got the favoured position in the semis and will be playing the second place team from the other group first.

Tomorrow is going to be interesting...