Tenth Week of 2010

So today my soccer team played with a playoff stake on the line. If we win and another team loses, we go on to make it. Another team was playing the first-place team and we were playing the last-place team, so I felt our chances of winning were good.

At the end, we ended up eating a humble pie, with the other team pretty much out-muscling and out-hustling us to a 4-2 loss. We had at least three shots hit the post and bounce out. I had one glaring miss, some of my teammates had less-glaring-but-still-awful misses. I also scored once.

Over the past two years of playing soccer, watching a lot of games and vicariously living the life of a footballer (it's called Winning/PES), I got much better at my shots, positioning and passes. Today was another lesson in itself.

I scored a goal in the first half. The ball bounced off the back wall, but before the ball hit the ground, I visualized what I can do in my head and started running hard toward the ball with a defender closing in. Keeping my focus until the very last second, I didn't even have to see the ball go into the net to know that I scored. It was a textbook execution play, like a cold-blooded tiger pouncing on a prey and finishing it off in style.

The second half, I positioned myself in the center on a counter-attack, with an able winger putting in the cross into the middle. As soon as the winger started running down on the right side, I visualized the finish in my head. A couple of hiccups, however: I was a bit gassed (now I know that McFlurry an hour before the game is NOT a good idea), and as the game wasn't going our way, I had a moment of panic as soon as I drew the play in my head. Sure enough, when the cross came in 0.5 seconds after I had panicked, I connected my boot to the ball in such a way that it went a few inches off the post, with my immediate thought calling for my own head. Afterward, I had a few other shots, some of which I did well to create, that went close but my miss was so glaring that for someone who has come to expect a clinical finish when given a chance, it was hard to swallow.

So, it is not about having just some experience and skill (not that I have plenty in both, but I'm alright, yah), but also having confidence, burning desire to want the finish and focus to do what it takes. I had all in the first half and lost them in the second half.

Now, on eve of what could be an important decision in my life, I am suddenly questioning myself. Getting cold feet. Wandering aimlessly. A part of it is coming from a dinner with a friend thinking about going from public sector to private sector. Our parents. How money cannot be ignored.

Sometimes, it really is hard to trust, you know? But confidence (in Him), burning desire to want the finish and focus...

I'd like to wrap up with a poem by Robert Frost.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.