Byrnes Tournament

Oh-fer

This weekend at the prestigious Byrnes Soccer Tournament things didn't go quite as planned for your beloved Razorbacks. Our first game vs. Blue Ridge, who we beat 4-1 last season at the Mauldin Cup, was scheduled for 8:30 p.m, already a late start time, but didn't actually kick off till 9:30 when temperatures had dropped from "cold" to "I can't feel my feet" celsius. Our attack was so pedestrian that due to lack of movement by their keeper, a blow torch had to be used to unstick him from the spot he found himself frozen to by the time the final whistle blew. Good thing we never got anything going because he was standing on the 18, all blue-lipped, waving his arms and pointing at his feet with still 15 minutes left in the game. That is just how brain-dead we were. Their keeper, frozen to the ground 18 yards from his own goal, and we couldn't even get close enough to chip one into the old onion bag. The final proof of how slushy our brains had become came when Henley Cothran threw out the old "double-dog dare" to his buddy Thad Estes on their way off the field. The whole crowd gathered around in silence while Esto poured hot coffee on his son's tongue to unstick it from the frozen goal post. Well, at least one of us tasted goal.

After Estocrates and I played a long game of "What if?" - as in, "What if we had Leo Messi on the wing, and Sergio Ramos at right back? And what if we could get Kaka and Ronaldo on loan from Real Madrid? etc. etc, we arrived in darkness back in Walhalla, scattered out into the woods to relieve ourselves, got the trash off the bus, got back on and headed back to Duncan. This was not a hugely popular decision but what else could we do? We had to be back on the pitch in two hours and we had an hour and a half drive. I've never been one for conspiracy theories, but something was definitely starting to smell fishy. I wondered, as I sat in the darkness marinating in the aroma of 16 unshowered soccer players, if we would ever be free from the nefarious clutches of OSLAP (Operation Squeel Like a Pig)(Refer to one of the earlier posts if you aren't familiar with it.)?

Our morning match was against a very good Eastside High team, but we came out in the first 15 minutes or so with some very nice stuff and actually got our only goal of the tournament off of a free kick, which we played quickly to Ovi Lopez who ripped a shot from the left side of the box into the back of the net. At half-time we were up 1-0. However, the No-doze wore off midway through the second half, and just as we were entering that all-important R.E.M. phase of sleep the final whistle blew with Eastside claiming a 2-1 victory. Could have been more, but since Joel Putnam, our lanky keeper, is prone to sleep walking, he actually entered his own dream physically, which happened to be the game we were playing, and made some unconscious saves. Thanks for keeping it respectable dude.

After a good hardy meal and a few large handfuls of gel on the hair, the hogs were ready to play again. Yes, we played Eastside totally gel-less, which is probably why we couldn't string more than 2 passes together at a time. We just didn't recognize each other. We finally came alive in the second half of our final match vs. Wade Hampton after much shifting of the line up and actually dominated the possession even though the final score of 3-0 did not reflect it. So out of 6 halves of soccer we played one good one. Hopefully we'll be able to build off of it and improve from here.

We'll be in Abbeville at 6:00 on the 18th, where hopefully we'll get our mojo back.

j