go arsenal go!

let's just hope we're not picking ourselves up the ground all day like old milos here.

launch party

ouch!

so team simkulet, soon to be known as international (because of our astoundingly international roster), we had our first game tonight. we're playing a variant of futsal in the mount royal college intramural league. and, yes, sadly, we lost 3-1 tonight from one of the two mexican teams. they bring their fans for christ's sake; how can we compete with that?

well, two ways we can compete with that are with our two stars: the beautiful game's mateo is our keeper and former australian futsal international bruce pederson is our man up front. matty saved us from a 5-1 thrashing and bruce saved us from being shut out with a gorgeous goal in the first half.

the rest of the team has a lot of potential (apart from yours truly. i am a defender, a center back, and the demanding skill play of futsal doesn't work well for a center back whose talent is with clearances and well timed tackles, but futsal should improve my total lack of skills -- i hope). we've got out dynamic polish duo in andrezj and denis. the former looks to be an excellent holding midfielder who can push forward, and the latter is a classic van nistelroy style goal mouth poacher. we've got kelechi, from nigeria, who has some excellent skills on the wing; and brian, one of our canadians, who has some nice ball handling skills. those are the folks who showed tonight, so it will be great to see what happens next week when we get some more folks out there.

as for the "ouch!" title...i'm not referring to the scoreline, but to my knee injury. i was challenging for a ball against one fo the mexican kids and we both connected with the ball at teh same time. the bottom half of my leg bent all out of wack and i dropped in agony. i got back out and played (bad idea), and now that i'm home my knee is fucked. kiki thinks it's a torn acl and wants me to go to the doctor.

first game...brilliant work.

not a good day at the pitch

a nil - nil draw today at upton park. not good. not exactly bad either. let's take stock shall we: henry is gone, pires is gone, bergkamp is gone. that doesn't help us at all, but i would like to think that even with those guys down we're a damn fine time. and we are when we're playing really well.

today, though, there were only a couple of guys playing well, and most of the guys were a mess. we were lucky that the hammers didn't take us out. i think we're damn lucky to have gotten away with a draw because for every good performance we had today we had a poor performance to hurt us. toure was great at the back, but lehmann was back to his old, scary antics, coming off the line too early and booting the ball out to touch. ljungberg was great in the midfield, creating most of the decent chances, but van persie was sloppy today, slipping on the turf, making bad choices and tripping over himself. fabregas and gilberto were strong down the middle, but hleb was the worst i've seen him, and reyes didn't seem to have it in him to go for goal.

and gilberto's injury near the end sends shivers down my spine. i have a feeling he's going to have a broken bone in his foot. and if he does we're fucked at ajax. no lehmann(although that could be a blessing), no van persie, all the injured boys out too, and maybe gilberto gone. ouch.

anyway, there is no doubt that the gunners just weren't good enough today, but how can anyone look at the injuries we've got and not admit that that is definitely at the root of the problem?

one last thing: we did have one bright spot today...quincy owusu-abeyie. he came on and made things happen. i hope he's on the bench for ajax (or even starting).