Part One: Lessons Were Learned
Sebago Cobras 1
Evastradas 5
I may as well admit this right off the bat: My sole motivation for starting an amateur soccer team was to name it the Cobras so I could get a t-shirt with a cobra on it.
Fast forward a few months from this original inspiration, and here we were on a Sunday night in October, The Cobras – a scruffy crew of artists, writers, carpenters and fishmongers downing beers in the downstairs dining room of our sponsor, Sebago Brewing Company, wearing bad-ass silk-screened shirts from Rogues Gallery, and talking strategy for our first game of the season the following night.
The match was against a team who call themselves Evastradas. “Don’t worry,” I told my teammates at the bar, “that name sounds Spanish. Latin Americans are notoriously bad at soccer.” While this may have boosted the confidence of those who don’t follow the world’s most popular sport, I couldn’t fool myself. We were in agua caliente.
The next evening, we cruised to the Portland Sports Complex, a dome that resembles a giant glowworm larva lolling between Joker’s and I-95. Inside we discovered a florescent wonderland where it’s always daytime and the grass is always green.
I tried to imagine the first rock concert scheduled for the PSC – the Goo Goo Dolls on the day after Thanksgiving. Standing in the future footprint of 3,000 screaming Goo Goo Dolls fans, I thought to myself, “Are there really 3,000 Goo Goo Dolls fans? Does the singer still have that lame choppy haircut?” (Check the band’s Web site – he does.)
This musing ceased abruptly when the whistle blew.
Lesson 1: When the ref blows the whistle, the game starts, whether or not your team is still stretching out on the field, talking about the best place to buy soccer socks, or pondering Johnny Rzeznik’s rock locks. Goal Evastradas.
Lesson 2: You can’t pass the ball back to the goalie so he can pick it up. Result: direct kick. Goal Evastradas.
Then the game really got started. Cobra Easy E. nailed a goal on a powerful corner kick that ricocheted off an opposing player – totally planned. N. Meyer chased down a breakaway and executed a perfect tackle against a bolting Evastrada. Cobra goalies Boulz and Slippery Slater each made a series of amazing saves. As a defensemen, I spent most of my time covering a massive British golem who smelled like cheese. He was slow, which was good, but again, he was massive. This was cause for concern when he booted a late direct kick that, if on target, would have defanged any Cobra in its path.
Sure, there were several other goals scored against us, but the title of this first part of the Cobras’ story is “Lessons Were Learned,” so that’s what we need to focus on. The question is, can this ragtag group overcome its comic foibles, grow as a team and win a seemingly impossible underdog victory, all the while learning the true meaning of friendship?
Probably not, but we have discovered that the adjacent bar, Turf’s, serves beer in giant glasses that hold the equivalent of three pitchers, and that’s almost as good. Stay tuned for part two of this three-part series, “The Two Sweetest Words in the English Language: For Feit,” next month.
