Play It Forward?

There was no drunken carousing this past weekend as I had to get up early on Saturday and head judge a limited format Kobe PTQ. We really expected a large turnout for this, but only 117 showed. I thought this would make things easier, but with my judge staff being two L0s and somewhere around 20 decklist errors/illegibilities, things were pretty rough in the first few rounds. Beyond that, things went smoothly and that's what I like to see. Sunday was even better than Saturday because it was the first weekend day where it was reasonably warm, very sunny, and I was free to hang out in the park. I went to a new location this time (Sheep Meadow) and got some sun for a few hours. Sooo nice! Then I forced myself through the waves of Puerto Ricans in order to get dinner and head back to my place to see all the World Cup matches that were taped on my DVR.

Yesterday I made exception to my rule of taping all World Cup matches and watching them later by watching the USA play Czech live during my lunch hour (or two). I honestly can't remember when I last had such a bad time (maybe when I had surgery on my finger?). Similarly, I can't remember when I last saw a professional team play as poorly as USA did in that opener game. Yes, USA is outclassed by Czech, but that doesn't mean you give up. By looking at interviews after the fact it's pretty obvious that USA wasn't in the game mentally - at all. I have no idea why that is, but putting that aside I can't imagine why they made the tactical decisions they did. What pissed me off more than anything is how any time a USA player would have the ball and dribble it forward, if a Czech player challenged they would stop, turn around and pass the ball back. They did this nearly every time! At one point in the game I started counting the number of times they didn't pass back and decided to cut the ball, make a turn and play the ball forward (which is what they should have done a lot more of)...I think I only counted two of these aggressive plays. It's really embrassing when your national team plays for 90 minutes doing things that MY local club gets yelled at by our coach for doing. There were times when I was thinking that my club could have done a better job than USA did...and that's just wrong.