Victory!

Well what do you know, we won our soccer game! It helps significantly that we had our entire team show up, and that we picked up one additional female player, so for once, we had subs (for the men) and 3 females that are really all on our team.

This set us up for a 5-4 victory which included a score for us in the 37th minute (it's a 40 minute game), and a series of two saves by me late in the 38th minute. It felt good to get a finally get a win when starting at goalkeeper, especially after it felt like we were so close last week.

I even got some kudos from Raul, who, as far as I can tell from my internet searching, played keeper in college at MIT. I didn't have any saves off of my eyeballs this week, although I did take a bit of a kick to the ribs near the end of the game while (successfully) diving for the ball as someone was taking a shot. One of our defenders was not pleased that the ref didn't call a penalty on the guy that kicked me, but as far as I can tell it was a pretty clean play. I got to it only a split second before he would have kicked it, and everyone was getting pretty aggressive near the end of the game anyway, so I don't blame the ref for not making a call.

The image here is from the movie "Victory" which Dan Bartnicki and I enjoyed quite a bit when we were kids. I mean, there is no better adversary than Nazis, and being able to earn your freedom from a prisoner-of-war camp by defeating them in a soccer match is really at the top of the chart for 8-year-old boy soccer players, especially when the movie stars both Sylvester Stallone AND Pele! LOL.