Treat Him So Gently (Comets v Dynamo)

November 6, 2011

I study Levi for a moment over our breakfast. It was my choice, so we’re at Denny’s. He hates Denny’s, but he drags me along to enough places with ingredients I’ve never heard of that I don’t feel too bad.

He confuses me these days: it’s never clear which Levi is going to show up. There’s the guy I’ve known for years, smart, capable, funny. And then there are these weird things that happen. The thing in Florida. The way he keeps straightening his silverware, making sure the knife and fork are perfectly parallel.

It’s unsettling.

And it seems to be getting worse. A few weeks ago, it seemed like it was either the normal Levi or this other stuff. Now, they seem mixed. Like right now: we’ve been talking about the game against the Dynamo, and it’s all been good. He knows what he wants to do, and it makes sense. But it’s like his right hand belongs to someone else: it keeps rearranging things, moving them around, and he keeps staring at his fingers, like the hand’s not his, like someone else is making it rearrange the silverware and the plastic salt and pepper shakers.

“What do we do about him, Jay?”

I lift my gaze to his. I know who he means: Michael Eneramo, easily for me the best signing of the offseason in NACL. He’s been a beast for the Dynamo, scoring fourteen in nineteen league games and a whopping thirty-five overall. He’s big, strong, fast, and deadly accurate, and we haven’t been able to stop him yet this year: we’ve played the Dynamo five times and he’s scored four.

I frown. “Nothing. I mean, nothing special. We can’t.” I shake my head. “When they were playing Felix, we knew him, he’s young, we could just get Andy to muscle up on him a few times and he’d fade a bit. But we can’t now. They Spanish kid they signed is too good.”

“He’s Guatemalan. Pablo Rodas. Guatemalan.”

“They speak Spanish there, right?” Levi nods, smiling, and I feel much better. This is what I’ve missed with him. “So, the Spanish kid. Whatever. He’s better than Felix is, and behind him, they’ve got Gosling and I think Nowak is going to start Koné.”

“So?”

“So we trust our players. They’ve done a great job back there all year, and when they’ve broken down, the Big Ginger’s saved us.” I raise my coffee cup in mock defense. “I know, I know. Graham. Graham McSweeney has done a great job for us all year. Better?”

Levi grins, and suddenly both hands are in motion, arranging things on the table. “OK, fine. We can’t focus on him too much. Not too much. But here. If we have Iro and Nsien play a little deeper, and Gueye drops into the hole there, we should always have a triangle around him. We just need Raphael and Kev to slide up and be prepared to carry it out a bit more.”

“Wait … is Gueye the pepper shaker or the sugar?”

“The sugar. Eneramo is the pepper shaker.”

I nod. “Yeah, Ali can do that.”

Lee eyes me apprehensively. “But?”

“But this, here,” I say, motioning with a knife to the space behind the sugar. “This worries me. We don’t really have anyone to drop back, and they have a lot of good attacking midfielders. Gosling. Koné. Javier Torres.” I shake my head. “I think he’ll have to pick his spots. And we have to see what Nowak actually does. He’s fucking insane, he may come out with four strikers. Or none.”

Lee stares at the pieces arranged in front of him. His hands withdraw back towards his lap, and he shakes his head slowly. His right hand emerges as if emerging from hibernation and adjusts the position of his fork, ever so slightly.

November 7, 2011

It was a clear day in Houston, but the wind was whipping across the field, with gusts up to forty miles per hour, making the wind chill far below the ambient temperature hovering in the low forties.

Lee seemed good today. He was focused, and he moved easily among the players and coaches before the game, sharing a joke, a bit of tactical advice, a final insight into how he thought the Dynamo would come out of the gate.

Just before we headed out onto the field, I turned to him. “We’re ready, Lee. We’re ready.”

He looks past me, not really focusing on anything that I can see, his voice held close to a whisper. “They’re better than we are. Don’t fool yourself. We may be able to steal this, but that’s it.” He smiles, but it’s a grim thing. “It’s OK. We just need to play well, and take care of business in the league. That’s it.”

He’s right. I know he’s right. But I don’t like hearing it minutes before game time. I’m not much of a rah-rah guy, but when that whistle blows, I’ll be damned if I don’t think that we can win. I don’t give a rat’s ass who we’re playing. We can win.

I turn away from Lee. Usually, I would say something but I feel like I need to treat him so gently right now. So I just stare out the end of the tunnel, my jaw a little tighter than usual, watching the trees in the distance bow like monks towards the buildings of the Houston Medical Center.

We jog out to a full stadium with over half the crowd in red and black, which is nice: two years ago, we would have played this game in a sea of Dynamo orange.

As we wait for Marie Laveau to blow her whistle, Levi turns to me. “If we’re going to do it, it’s going to be because your side does well and we take advantage of that back line. You see Simpson out there?” I nod. Keithy Simpson is being touted as a future star, but at twenty-one, the young Jamaican has a way to go. “He’s the weak link. Try to get the ball cleared up to Leo, see what he can do against him.”

The piercing sound of the whistle starts the game in motion before I can answer, and soon we’re both lost in the business at hand. It’s a back and forth start to the game: we have more of the ball, but they are pushing our defense, especially down the wings where Spanish veteran Gabri and a Dutch import named Robbert Schilder are doing whatever they want to. However, Nsien is having a monstrous game in the middle, twice stopping Eneramo cold, the first time I’ve seen someone meet the Dynamo’s striker’s strength for strength.

But it slowly slips away and there isn’t much I can do from the sidelines. Just after half an hour in, Eneramo finds a few inches of space between Iro and Friedland, bursting through the gap and firing it hard and low across McSweeney. The young Irishman has a chance, but the ball skips off his hand and into the back of the net.

Our players have their heads down as they move back upfield and in spite of encouragement from both Lee and me, we look out of sorts. The Dynamo take advantage of it right away, Francisco Javier Torres sending a long pass to Rodas, who deftly moves the ball to his right foot and shoots. McSweeney is uncharacteristically slow to respond and suddenly they are up by two.

This time, we’re not so encouraging.

A little screaming and a little questioning of their focus seems to be what’s needed, and Levi and I both give them a piece of our minds. It seems to work, as our defense is much more focused after that.

Our best chance to get back into the match comes a minute into the second half, when Matty Richardson has only the keeper to beat form fourteen yards, but his shot is soft and straight at Andy Gruenebaum.

Levi is pushing them hard at the end, desperate to get a goal back: a one goal deficit can be made up in the next leg, two will be much harder. Unfortunately, we cannot break through, and the final whistle blows with the scoreline unchanged.

I clap Lee on the shoulder. “They played well.”

He turns to me, his jaw clenched and a distant sadness in his eyes. “Not well enough.” He glances back at the field, shakes his head, and turns away, trudging slowly through the tunnel, leaving me to console the players still on the field.

The Silver Boot Final, First Leg
Houston Comets v Houston Dynamo, Rice Track & Soccer Stadium
Comets 0 – Dynamo 2 (Michael Eneramo 32, Pablo Rodas 35)
MoM: Pablo Rodas (7.8) Best Comet: Graham McSweeney (6.8)
Attendance: 5552. Referee: Marie Laveau.