Green Book 2022: Tomorrow We'll Be Sore

While the opposition was closing the ever-menacing Daniel with often a duo of players and
Muzz with their finest, Ali finally shook the net from the inside for 1-4 and it felt the game
was suddenly on! Daniel tried to get their dam to burst fully but all that (almost) burst was
the crossbar from his shot when eye-to-eye with their keeper. Not our day, clearly …
A couple of runs down the field later, UWA struck a couple of side-net beauties on the counterattack
to bury the game. Tomaz got his fuoro top well and truly dirty with a few more
saves, Greens had a couple more over-the-top digs and by the time Liam blew the whistle
we had all had enough.
Too many in our net and not many in theirs … but it’s round 3, right? Upwards and onwards.
Not surprisingly, many supplied their perspective after another heavy loss. There was lots of
encouragement, perspective seeking and reminders of the previous season but also some
sobering words. The areas we all agreed need to be addressed were our backchat, our
defence and our formation. Liam who thankfully stepped in to ref on the day gave his typical
blunt assessment of what our backchat does to the ref, our focus and with it the quality of
our game. None of it pretty. The granite defence from the back end of last year was this year
shipping way too many goals that could be prevented with better cooperation and a little
more desperation.
For all the jokes about formation, it was high time for us to settle on something. The return
to the simple old 4-4-2 that worked for us last year may have caused derision among the EPL
pundits but hey - we weren’t facing Chelsea-likes on Sundays. Our biggest immediate
trouble with 4-4-2 for us however was not its conservative, old school feel. It was the fact
that it required fielding ten players plus keeper as COVID started to mow us down like a
badly mistimed Peruvian slide tackle.
The sorry sequence for the week started with Jorge testing COVID positive on Monday.
Fortunately the severity of illness and self-pity was quickly eased by his teammates
supplying a steady stream of tactical videos and heartfelt reminders how he won’t be
missed. With a few lads away for work or injured, some chasing important Mothers Day
brownie point, Mo still recovering from surgery and Jorge in bed with COVID, we had a bare
bones 11 plus a few tentative offers of help from Reds after Thursday training. On Friday, we
got the “sorry, got COVID” post from Conrad and one on Saturday from Nursey. As ever-thegent
Liam led the offers of help if stuck, we learned just hours before the game against
Curtin that Renzo too had joined the Two Lines Club that morning. As another ever-the-gent
on the team, Renzo actually turned up at Curtin to cover for Daniel’s rookie mistake and
brought him a pair of boots - surely a new level of ‘service’ to a striker.
With zero subs even with a couple of gracious Reds’ stand-ins, a warm day, good opposition
and a sick, fully masked COVID-positive Renzo running the line for the first half, we kicked off
…