Dives, slipery shirts & ‘the divot.’ Cameron Road’s losing streak continues.

Cameron Road (or the Bad News Bears of D2), lost yesterday’s game to Valladolid 2-1 and continued their snake bitten run through the fall season. Finishing the campaign with 7 points is actually a high compared to the last couple seasons, but losing 4 out of the last 7 games by 1 goal has kept them holding down the bottom of the table until their upcoming spring blitzkrieg.

With a full compliment of 17 players at their disposal, all signs were pointing to a Cameron Road power performance as they sought to turn around their recent poor form. With Jay passed out at Waterloo Park, his roomate and understudy, Chris Marks, donned the keeper gloves and did everyone a favor by playing goalie.

The first 10 minutes of the game were controlled by the passing of Valladolid, but their possession didn’t turn into many scoring opportunities. After soaking up the early pressure, Cameron Road went on the counter attack, mostly down the right wing where Billy and Ciro were linking up for some nice play. Ciro got in behind the defense with several Pato-like runs, trying to feed Willis inside the box.

Cameron Road thought they had the early lead when Chappy headed home a BT free kick inside the box. But the first of many Valladolid dives wiped out the goal as Willis was called for ‘pushing’ the defender down to the turf. I mean, everyone knows that Willis has trouble pushing a lawnmower to the turf, let alone an adult human being. Crazy call, but it wouldn’t be the last time that dives and poor sportsmanship came into play. As a matter of fact, they came into play in the very next sentence as the same Valladolid ‘gentleman’ went sprawling to the turf, clutching his neck, as Chappy jockeyed for position on another attack. There was no foul given, but he did not escape a blast of foul language from the Captain who did not take kindly to his play acting.

Willis had another blast at goal or two, Billy got in deep behind the defense on a great run, and BT’s attempt at a flying header was off the mark as well. By halftime, Cameron Road should have been up several goals, but instead they were left to ponder their misfortune.

The second half started with Cameron Road again driving forward with Scott on the right hand side of midfield and Dermot on the left. McKenna danced around defenders inside the box looking for a goal, and Chris Peterson and Leif tried to pull the strings from the center of the pitch.

Unfortunately, it was Valladolid who got on the score sheet first with a pretty amazing shot from midfield. A Valladolid midfielder ran at the CRU defense from the left hand side and let loose an early bomb from 40 yards that caught Chris slightly off his line to take the lead at 1-0.

At this point, the game was really heating up because Valladolid’s key strategy seemed to be to whine in unison at every suspected Cameron Road foul on them, and to again whine in unison whenever they committed a foul or dive. The fact that the ref didn’t seem to speak a word on English was not helping matters. At one point Billy was yellow carded for a push after being on the receiving end of a punch, but the ref failed to yellow card the Valladolid player. With no explanation given, tempers were close to the boiling point.

Another unfortunate event took place shortly there after as Chris Marks was undone by his silky threads. As he gathered up a seemingly harmless shot in his arms, the ball squirted through his ‘slippery’ shirt’s grasp and rolled into the back of the net. It would have been tragic if it weren’t so amusing. 2-0 Valladolid.

With 30 minutes remaining to get back into the game, Cameron Road found themselves in familiar territory on the trail of a comeback. It was then Leif to the rescue, as he was awarded a PK for being hacked down inside the box and delivered with a cool finish to the bottom corner. Cameron Road had several other chances to tie up the score with players pushing forward in droves. At one point, yet another controversial play took place as Chappy burst into the box and was taken down by a 50 year old man with a ponytail. The linesman awarded a free kick outside the box when there was clearly a torn up divot in the grass inside the box where he was fouled. Again, the referee was not able to communicate his thoughts to anyone, further adding to the frustration levels.

Throughout the game, the defense played well. Cuyler injured his ankle, but was able to return for the final surge. Hopefully he’ll be in good enough shape to stand tall in the Fall Cup. Steve Crosley was a welcomed back sight at left back, and Bob was his usual self in the center.

The final whistle sounded, ending a very frustrating afternoon for Cameron Road, who really should have buried this team in the first half and let them complain their way to a loss. Surely, this will only serve as fuel for their customary spring raid on the top of the table.

Man-of-the-Match: Chris Marks was thrown into the lion’s den on Sunday, making his first team debut out of position in between the pipes, and for that we thank him with this most glorious award.

Man-of-the-Post-Match: Howling with mighty laughter at all of Chappy’s fabulous jokes (mostly aimed at the infamous 90lb stick figure from Strikers known as ‘Pink Boots’), Cuyler proved to be a more than capable comedic wingman.