Well, what should I say. As a non-qualified sweeper,
I should keep my mouth shut up. As the acting captain
now, I am responsible for communicating with the team
on the issues we have and hopefully we still like to
work together to rebuild the team spirit. I choose to
do it since I always believe some communication is
good for the team, especially in this difficult time.
For those who do not like my emails, please disregard
this and I fully apologize to clatter your mailbox
one more time.
Yesterday's game was a disaster. It was the worst
game I played and it was the worst score that my team
got since I played in NTPSA. As the sweeper and the
acting captain, I must have done something wrong. As
the sweeper, I apologize for pushing up too much and
allowing the ball being passed over my head, which
resulted in the loss of the second goal. As the acting
captain, I apologize for not trying to take it under
control after many of us spent too much energy on
blaming teammate's mistake and thus totally lost our
focus on what we should do in the second half during
the half time discussion. Man, I still think it is
kind of subtle for me to handle the situation when my
capability as a sweeper was questioned and there looks
like a couple of better alternatives. What I can do is
seating on bench in the second half quietly to cool
down everybody.
After we become the champion again last season, I told
Chen Shi that something is going wrong with our team
chemistry and we may have some difficulty in our
future
games. I didn't expect it went so far. These are what
we saw in yesterday's game:
-- We started the game with about 13 players and many
of us was getting warm-up in the game. Before checking
ID cards, the referee even come to our bench to make
sure we had enough (or more than 8) players to start
the game. This makes our opponent a little happy.
-- After we lost the second goal with 30 to 35 minuts
of playing, our players begin to toss out negative
comments on the field. Situation become even worse
during the half time break. This makes our opponent
even happier. I still remeber how loudly we laughted
at that Jamaca team. Were we any better than them?
-- We were totally out of focus on how to play the
game and some players were not in the playing mode at
all. This makes our opponent more happier.
-- We started to foul technically or non-technically.
Fortunately, the referee decided to show no more
yellow cards after we lost the 4th goal. The last
thing we did not do is fighting with the referee. This
disappoints our opponent a little bit.
Some of these are within my expectation, especially
when we are not ready both mentally and physically and
still think we are a strong team in a tougher
division.
What is out of my expectation is that how weakly we
are when we fall behind in the game. It may not be a
bad thing to identify these issues earlier. There
are 8 games left and we still have time to work
together to get these issues resolved if we want to.
Regarding to myself, I admit that I may be too old
(or not qualified) to be a sweeper for the team. After
playing this position for more than two seasons in
this
team, I was starting to remove myself out of it in the
middle of last season. I felt lucky that our previous
opponents did not give me too much embarrassed time
and would like to thank other defense players for
their
strong support which prevented me from getting too
much
embarrassed time. I should blame Chen Shi for setting
me up again and again :-). I must be a fool daring to
take this position again after the incident in the
game vs Drillers last season, in which most of us
thought the game result was not important at all.
However, I will try to play in some other positions
to make contribution toward the team success.
Hopefully, I will figure out my retire time from this
lovely sport has not come yet :-).
See you guys later.
Huan Li
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 27 2002 - 13:00:08 CST