Again, a big congratulations to all four teams for making the NIAA Regional Championship games, this year in particular is special because the North hosts state and therefore all four of these teams will compete in the State Championship tournament which is Friday/Saturday, November 13th and 14th. (stay tuned for coverage of those matches)
A big Congratulations to the Bishop Manogue Miner Girls and the Carson High Senator Boys for their NIAA Regional Championship Wins in some of the wackiest weather I’ve ever seen for a soccer game!
Don’t believe me… This was about 15 minutes into the boys game, the girls game finished in these conditions… YIKES! 🙂
I left during the boys game due to the fact that the snow was so intense the camera would grab focus on the snow and not the player… see below…
Some shots from the girls game first… The game started out with just a slight bit of rain and Douglas seemed to have more of the attacking for most of the first 3/4 of the game… not to say that Manogue didn’t have their opportunities, just seemed that the pressure of the game was with Douglas…Â 
Then in the second half the weather picked up… it wasn’t quite cold enough to snow quite yet but not just solid rain either… the camera is already starting to have issues….
As with most of the last several years of Regional Championship games, I set up a remote camera in the goal… Regional Championship day has been on a bright sunny Saturday afternoon with barely a whisper of clouds in the sky… So the “opportunity” to get something good on a night like this was very much foiled by the conditions… the big bright dots are rain drops on the lens… the blurry players are because when you shoot with a remote like this you need more light to allow you to shoot with the lens more closed down and thus my shutter speed went WAY down to 1/30th of a second for this shot (remember aperture, the smaller the number the more shallow the depth of field, with a remote you want everything in focus so you use a smaller aperture (a larger number…)…).  You generally shoot portraits of people around 1/125th and I shoot sports at 1/1000th… if it were not for the tripod the camera is on here everything would have been blurry so I’ll take what I got… 🙂
This next photo seems rather uninteresting but will be talked about as a huge controversy of this game… I know FIFA is all over the news for bad and corrupt leadership but the fact still remains they are the maker and keeper of the laws of the game and this one is literally black and white in the rule book…
Law 12 from the FIFA Rule book… see the Bolded section…
- Sending-off offenses:
A player, substitute or substituted player is sent off if he commits any of the following seven offences:- serious foul play
- violent conduct
- spitting at an opponent or any other person
- denying the opposing team a goal or an obvious goalscoring opportunityby deliberately handling the ball (this does not apply to a goalkeeper within his own penalty area)
- denying an obvious goalscoring opportunity to an opponent moving towards the player’s goal by an offence punishable by a free kick or a penalty kick
- using offensive, insulting or abusive language and/or gestures
- receiving a second caution in the same match
I’ve been involved with soccer a very long time (1979), there are a lot of “judgement” rules for soccer where the referees have to make a decision, is it a foul or is it not a foul (and spectators expect an instant decision…)… FIFA added this rule right before a World Cup (I believe it was before the 2002 World Cup) and it created a lot of controversy at the time but was put in place to radically discourage an age old practice and was the beginning of what has now been coined by FIFA as “Fair Play”… They have a good point as this was very common practice in all my years of playing… can’t quite get there or stop them, just take them down with a little bump, nudge or trip… no big deal… NOWÂ with an automatic red card on the table, you don’t do that any more…. There isn’t a player on the field that hasn’t had that rule in place for their entire playing career….
That resulted in Douglas playing with 10 with just a few minutes to go (the play was outside the box so no penalty kick, “just” a direct free kick…) and momentum swung completely in favor of the Miners… They scored and solidified their Championship.
Here’s the muck the boys were dealing with… the camera was having fits with this weather… I had to call it a night… I have a feeling we may very well see this matchup again in the State Championship game… we’ll see on Friday if the South teams have something for either of these two teams. 🙂
