New season starts tonight

At 9:00 tonight, under the big lights, my new team will start the summer soccer season. Of course, following tradition, the weather is cold, windy and showing promise of rain later.

This is another combined division, with young men born in the years 1990, 1991 and 1992. I seem to have a disproportional number of Italian names on the team this year: I can already hear the demands that we call ourselves something like "Juventis" or "AC Milan".

Purple uniforms this year, with no direct sponsor, so I'll probably just refer to the team as "Whitby Purple" unless the team persuades me that they want to be called something a bit less generic.

Update: Well, a chilly night it was, but the rain held off. The first half was brutal: we were facing a 3-0 deficit after the first half hour. All the action seemed to be down near our goal area, with only a few feeble attempts to strike back. Nothing we did seemed to change the situation.

After the break, the second half was played in a different mode . . . within five minutes, Anthony C. put us on the scoreboard playing from the left forward position. Within the next five, we tied the score, with another goal by Anthony and one from Nick M.

On the sideline, spirits were lifted by the first goal, but after Anthony's second score, you'd have thought that Purple had a five-goal lead: the pure joy and excitement was a wonder to behold.

We played, with the score level, until about the 80^th minute, when Andrew S. managed to get a foot on the ball in a pile-up in front of the Neon goalmouth and just gently nudged the ball into the net. After that, it was merely a matter of keeping Neon from pulling level . . . which put the pressure on Chris A., our goalkeeper, but he was up to the challenge.

A few injuries during the game had Randall and Andrew on the sidelines for a while, but both were able to resume playing after having a chance to recover. Victor was restricted to only limited duty, as he's not fully back from his dental surgery last week.