Rough Afternoon

My son Alex had a rough afternoon on the pitch today-- it was hot and we were playing a very tough South River team on their insane grass field-- it's part baseball field, part soccer field, with lots of bumps and ramps and hillocks-- and we're used to playing on turf and this team just cut us apart-- and our big center back (who knocked Alex out of the previous game with a head-to-head collision, knocked himself out of this game by planting his nose into the back of someone's head while going up for a header-- it was a bloody mess) and our 3-5-2 formation couldn't handle the skill and speed and wily moves of this mainly Portuguese team-- they knew how to play the proper weight passing into the space on the grass; they knew how to trap bouncing and lofted balls; they knew the simple feints that would work in order to get a defender tied up in the mud; and they knew how to run two players, one after the other, through the ball when it wildly bounced off the random patches of dirt and crabgrass-- but it's better to play a game like this and learn something than not play at all, and luckily, South River is group 2 and we are group one, so we won't run into them in the States.