We went into this game hoping to exorcise some ghosts. Many will remember the Massacre of Westway last year in 2020, when we played 2 league outfits consecutively, and were soundly thrashed, it paid for any plans we had to join a league and was a sobering couple of weeks.
Since then, we have improved a lot in terms of ability, as a team and some of us have made giant steps in terms of technical ability. Ash, who never played football till last year, has been the most improved player of FC7 this year and Mo's fitness has similarly risen loads. For myself, my lung capacity took a hit, and fitness in general dipped, it was a busy week at work, with a lot of travelling and heavy lifting and I wore some new boots that with hindsight, I should of worn in a little more during some training seshs. Tey, Frodo & Jumbo felt the pinch of fitness too, the bigger pitch at Westway pushing us a little too far.
Directly after the match against Westway SC, the boys were pretty down, I tried my best to pick them up but it was a bitter pill to swallow, heavy defeats do this to you, at the point of the final whistle it's easy to only see negatives, but as of writing this match report up, I've had a couple more looks at the video (which we have started doing primarily for a bit of YouTube fun, but has been useful to see our performances too in retrospect too), and there's a few positives we definitely have to take home.
Last year, I felt we were chasing teams too much, we very rarely got our foot on the ball, with the our atrocious fitness, those games were painful experiences. This week, we lost, we lost heavily but it felt different to me. The other Se7enistas might not of felt it, but my tough week meant I was in goal a lot, so I do see a lot of the game in a great POV.
We passed the ball around a lot
We tackled and marked better
We made more movement and gave our team mates options
We never really did the above at all last year, so I think we need to applaud ourselves. The above were just not done enough, when we had the ball, we did very little. When we marched forward, we were too rushed, shooting in impossible positions when there were better options available. Our striking is still really poor where as our opponents were decisively more clinical than us.
This was an interesting game, large periods of us keeping possession, never really capitalising on it, and eventually, a rushed mis-pass or poor shot on goal and our opponents hit us on the break and had a much higher goals per shot ratio than us. This game was a good lesson on how you get punished for mistakes. We may not of seen that done as expertly to us against other teams, because we never held the ball as much as we did during last weeks game.
Once you analyse our performance on tape, you see it's not all doom and gloom.
But there's a lot of negatives too. Our fitness will come, we spoke A LOT about this last year, there's not much we can do about this as team, as the weeks go by, it will improve. Once we come out of lockdown fully, this will change too. But it still affects our games. Man-marking, stray passes and negating fast counter attacks can't be combated with our slowness currently. But we are also rushing things, it's mental mistakes we are making. Poor decision making, constantly driving the ball into the dead-zones is something we do much of still. We're too focussed on the goal and are blind to pass the ball back and start building up again.
Defensively, with fitness, man-marking is tough, we don't have the legs to both support attack and concentrate on tracking back but stupid dilly-dallying in our own half, happens all too often and this weeks game saw us not get away with it. We were punished by goals conceded time and time again.
Sometimes these defeats are good though. You never get stronger if you don't learn from your mistakes. You need to recognise these too. We played a fitter team, but they played smarter too. This game will ultimately be a benefit to us. It serves to importantly remind everyone, that none of us our perfect and sometimes emotions are raw in the direct aftermath. Take a step back, digest everything and try to learn from things. It's the only way you ever improve in life in general.
After a couple of days, we had got over the initial disappointment, Jumbo was itching for a re-match, but we've got a lot more organised these days, so have a few training sessions scheduled before we head back to Westway for another competitive match on the bigger 6-a-side pitch. Training matches are more about fun, but they also provide us opportunities to try out new things, get some things mentally imprinted, and of course on a smaller 5-a-side, it will be powerful aerobic exercise as we all have a long way to go in that sense too.
So bring on PF@ShepherdsBush, as we get back off the floor and focus on taking onboard our mistakes as well trying to build upon the good things we now have in our foundation.
Until then, stay tuned!
Any other business?
Last week's game raised some interesting debate. It showed that as a group of players we all have different abilities. It also showcased that everyone has different things that they want to get out of our weekly games. Sometimes they aren't aligned, so we will be looking towards to adding a 2nd game, at first once a month, starting maybe in late June or early July. We'll see how we go at first, everything is trial and error, we'll market it as a more elite game, higher level with a more competitive flavour and another opportunity to add some extra fitness to our week.
It adds another angle to our story, brings an edge to our games while still keeping our weekly kickaround quite grounded and fun. It brings something for everyone.
We'll keep you outdated once we get something more solid down, so again, stay tuned.
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