November 7, 2011

Even though the final score wasn't to our liking, I got the impression that most of you had a good time on Sunday night and enjoyed the hard back-and-forth battle with the Huiwen squad. As Ben kept remarking, this is the kind of team that is good practice/training for us, while also certainly helping get us fit again (or, at the very least, reminding us how out-of-shape we are, haha).

Good job in the match against Chunghsing U. Alumni today. There were some very pretty goals in our 8-3 victory, spread across several players. Thanks to a aggressive Chunghsing team which never gave up, it was a hard-fought game. The first half in particular was a back-and-forth slugging match--every time Compass would score, they would tie us up. Eventually, however, we pulled ahead and kept building up our lead into the second half, despite the heat, humidity and tiredness. The second half only saw one goal from them--a PK given on a foul in our box.

Well, it didn't all go the way we wanted it to, but it was still a truly fun, memorable weekend of football and time together as a team. Despite narrowly missing out on some new Compass hardware, I honestly thought it was one of the best Cup weekends in a while--the matches, the in-betweens and the post-tourney socializing (more on that below).

It's rather clear that the Pacers (a.k.a. the Bane of Our Existence) can consider themselves rather fortunate to walk away with a 3-3 tie, as their post-game celebration and our opposite reaction made clear. Luck can't fully explain their comeback from a 0-3 deficit but not one, but TWO, PKs called against Compass on supposed fouls in the box certainly helped their cause.

Today was a relatively fun, challenging match against our old nemesis, the PE College, despite the 4-1 loss--as Yves noted, apparently correctly, it was our very first loss in 2011. I think most of you would agree that we did a pretty good job holding our own. As usual, their fitness and speed became more apparent in the second half and allowed them to begin taking advantage of our lapses, despite the fact that we were able to read their plays fairly well.

Sunday's 3-1 victory over Chung Hsing University (CHU) obviously won't go down as our prettiest performance, but it was an enjoyable game that will be a good warm-up for what promises to be a very challenging PE College match next Sunday.

Once again, a big thanks to Artem for helping set up the game with his "other" team. Artem ably helped his surrogate side keep Compass on its toes in what was a challenging match the entire 90 minutes. Jose didn't show up to play for CHU this time, probably a good thing for Compass, which only had 12 players out--our leanest turn-out in a long time.

Compass walked away from Saturday's match feeling a lot better than a week earlier, thanks to a nice 2-0 win over Tainan Phoenix in a hard match that certainly wasn't easy.

Ben O. and Hans both commented before the match that we had one of the best line-ups that they had seen in a while for Compass, with our full contingent of Frenchmen, thanks to Arno's return, as well as most of the entire squad. While Tainan didn't look like they had everyone, they certainly brought out some of their big guns, including veterans like Ollie and Leigh.

In the second match of the season, Compass faced the Kaoshiung Massive at home in Taichung. Compass started the game on a somewhat disorganized, less-than-controlled note, giving a well turned-out Massive side most of the offensive action for the first 10-15 minutes. It was towards the end of this period that they got a point off of an unlucky header off two of our defenders in what appears to have been a Compass own goal. However, for the rest of the half, Compass outplayed them and took control of the game.

Saturday, March 12, 2011 - Taichung, Taiwan

Taichung Compass drew Taichung Tubbies for the first Southern League match of the season. The Tubbies showed up with their best side, augmented by at least two new additions - a fast Russian expat, and a good English player new to the Taichung football scene. While Compass had a solid side, we were missing a number of starters to various causes.