Kickoff: 4:00 pm Saturday, October 8th at Point Grey Turf
For those involved with Rino’s Div 2 team fortunate enough to have known Andrew Wade today was an emotional and moving day. Having spent the morning celebrating the life of a wonderful human being we gathered ourselves in the afternoon to do what Andrew did so well – play our hearts out on the football pitch.
Having struggled to find the back of the net thus far this season Rino’s opted for an attacking 4 – 3 – 3 formation to start this match. Although we were largely in control, our first half performance was inconsistent and we were guilty of playing panicky and rushed football. In fact it was Cliff who might have opened the scoring on the counter attack when their striker somehow blundered his way through our defence only to scupper his shot hopelessly wide.
Tempers were heightened as Cliff’s defensive tactics continued to frustrate the Rino’s players. Resultantly we seemed to play down to their level and created few chances apart from a decent penalty shout from Shawn as he was clumsily bundled over in the penalty area approaching half time.
Rino’s were a bit flat to start the second half , yet to our credit we persevered and began to take control of the match. Substitutions up front and in midfield brought some fresh energy and while Greg had put in his usual hard working shift, the introduction of Francois ultimately led to Rino’s opening goal 20 minutes from time.
Following slick interplay down the left flank Francois delivered the killer through ball to find the run of yours truly. I just about managed to stay onside before firing the ball past the keeper with a left-footed strike from 10 yards.
Having found the elusive first goal Rino’s continued to dominate and led 2-0 shortly after. Despite being gifted extra time to prepare to defend a corner kick while the referee was distracted by the untimely intrusion of a Cliff player’s young child
(who had also earlier intruded to stop Cliff from taking a quick throw in) the Cliff players still managed to leave myself unmarked at the top corner of the 18. Ryan delivered a short pass and, having not been closed down, I proceeded to strike an ‘unstoppable’ right-footed drive into the top right hand corner of the net. To be honest it largely resembled Adam Johnson’s recent stunner for Manchester City against Blackburn Rovers (but I’m super modest of course).
As with my first goal I celebrated with a tribute to the sky where #11 Wadey was watching today and providing me with inspiration.
The fight was surely out of Cliff at this stage and Rino’s leading scorer from last season took advantage to get off the mark and wrap up the 3 points. Using his fantastic speed Tim broke in on goal, following another excellent Francois pass, and poked past the dismayed keeper.
Cliff’s afternoon was dismally summed up as the aforementioned keeper (already the recipient of a caution in this match) was shown a straight red card for threatening and abusive behaviour (commonly known as a temper tantrum).
All in all a good result for Rino’s on a day of remembrance for our inspirational #11.
Recap:
Players: Will, Ash, Evan, Hawk, Dhiren, Vinny, Riley (Yuda 70), Travis (Ryan 45), Greg (Francois 55), Shawn (Gur 45), Adam (Tim 40)
Goals: Vinny (2), Tim
Assists: Francois (2), Ryan
haha good call updating the sub times. I tried my best to guess. But you couldn’t have fixed my grammatical errors while you were at it? Clearly my head’s still wobbly from that elbow in north van…
I thought I read some grammatical errors the first time through, but then when I started re-reading it in the tiny editor window I couldn’t find them anymore and just gave up.