I have waited for a few days to write this blog, as I really wanted to collect my thoughts on what has happened to us. I will try to combine both games into this one blog.
We started the week-end by playing at Southwestern University on Friday, October 15th. As our season continues to move forward, our play continues to move backwards. Why? I really have no idea what has happened. All I can say is that there is absolutely no "Passion" for the game, nor for playing the game the way we are certainly capable of playing. When you have zero intensity, zero want and zero effort, you can never be successful. It is such a shame for us to be in this situation, when we have on paper, the talent to win virtually all our games. But, if the want is not present at every training session, it certainly will not be present at the games. Somehow, someway, we must find our want once again, like we had in a few games this season.
Against Southwestern, we gave up 3 really bad goals once again. This seems to be our way this season. make it easy for our opponents to score and difficult for us to score. I am not going to go into detail on how the goals were scored, but suffice it to say, they were not developed by our opponent, but rather by us. No accountabilty is where we must change. When we make these same mistakes over and over again, we must take responsibilty for our poor play, that continues to beat us in every game. Until we do that, we will never become successful. We must become harder on ourselves than I am on each player and say, "I will not continue to make the same mistakes time after time". We lost the game 0:3 and we were never a threat to score in this game. We have now gone 445 minutes without scoring a goal. We left on Saturday for San Antonio to play against the number 5 team in the nation... Trinity University on Sunday afternoon.
Against Trinity, I was hoping for the same kind of "Passion and Intensity" that we had against Washington University (number 10 in the nation) and DePauw University (number 25 in the nation). Unfortunately, we had the same hangover from Friday in our level of play and lost 1:4. Last year, if you remember, we tied them 1:1. We had virtually the same team and Trinity did as well. They replaced their leading scorer to graduation with a terrific Brazilian player. So, again, on paper, this should have been a good even game. That was not the case. They scored 45 seconds into the game, just like Southwestern did to start the 2nd half. So, once again, we have a team full of lazy players that are just satisfied to be on the field. We have way too many players that feel "entitled" to be on the field regardless of their play. Well, that will no longer be the case. In the 2nd half, we saw some nice bright spots out of some players who had not played an awful lot this season. But, I can guarantee you this, they will start playing now. There is a core of players who in my opinion are only marking time and not really caring what the outcome of our game becomes. As per my philosophy, I will never single a player out in writing or in public. They all know who they are. Conversely, the players that truly care, know who they are as well. Our goal was scored from an outstanding free kick by Brynjar Arnason which their keeper saved and the result was a hard effort to win the corner by Jarred Brookins. The ball was played into Nathan Haywood, who headed the ball down to Tim Tincher for our goal. I was indeed very proud of the players who worked hard until the end and to those players, thank you!
Now, how do we change our poor play? Well, we are going to instill a new kind of pressure defense cfor 90 minutes against our opponent and not allow them to get into a flow. As opposed to allowing teams to make the game against us, we are going to make the game against them with our play. But, before we can start to do that, we must first find our first touch again and then be able to complete a pass to our teammates feet and then "Think" on and off the ball. the last ingredient before we can accomplish anything is to change our attitude and develop our passion again for the game we all love or used to love. Then we will start sprinting to every ball and to every space available to us throughout the game. Once we do those things we can become successful again, as I will not allow this to continue to destroy us. I guarantee we will see a changed team for the remainder of our season.
Our record now stands at 3 wins, 6 losses and 3 ties. We play Millsaps College on Saturday at 6:00 Pm at our field. Please come out and support us to a new and improved vision of performance with Passion!
Coach G from BSC
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