It had to happen. I can’t believe it. I expected it only to happen a long, long time from now, if at all. I am flabbergasted. Ryan (in his brand new, sparkly Stormers jersey) and I were beaten in a FIFA match. By the buffoon in the picture and his partner in crime, Jeremy. Just what the heck went wrong? Is this world coming to an end?!? ;)
Actually, I’m not sure. Ryan and I were on Messenger during the day and we made a firm decision that last night we were going to shore up our defence and score a ton more goals against Jeremy and Karl than what we did last time. This was our third four-man FIFA meeting and the two previous occasions had been a complete whitewash for the two of them. But this time, unbeknownst to us, Karl and Jeremy had a plan.
Opening match. First goal. Karl and Jeremy. WTF?? And it wasn’t a fluke, because the game ended 4-2 in their favour!! Unbelievable! And just to drive home the point that they could do it again, they won another one during the course of the night, again by a two goal margin!
My hat goes off to the two of them for performing so admirably this time around. True, they still relied solely on route one football to score breakaway goals, still only played with England, still haven’t managed to get more than 40% possession during a game, still allowed us more than 25 shots at goal per game and still conceded a hell of a lot of goals which led to some massive, spirit-crushing victories for us as well as the overall title for the night, but nevertheless they had proved themselves by beating the experienced team of Ryan and Craig, not once, but twice! Congratulations guys! Take a bow!
As per usual, the four of us munched through four or five packs of chips and consumed around four litres of cooldrink during the night’s festivities and with Ryan not having to work early this morning, we stayed pretty late playing soccer for a change. It looks like we are going to stick to FIFA 07 for the long run now because it provides for more scoring action and lets Karl and Jeremy play against us on a slightly more equal footing. Not that I am complaining about the switch of course, because man I put in some stunners into the back of the net, particularly from some lethal long range power shots.
Ryan also weighed in with some decent goals, but it was Jeremy and Karl who surprised us the most, expertly using the placed shots to beat our keeper and even scoring a magnificent goal off a free kick! Our strategy of picking a team to play with based on my random choice of jersey colour only backfired once or twice and I think we’ll stick to that way of choosing who to play with simply because it is nice and pretty. And means that the commentators get to say something different than ‘Owen’ and ‘Rooney’ all the time! :)
As you can tell by now, it was a pretty successful evening of FIFA soccer with lots of goals, drama and the occasional fart (for some reason it would seem that only Jeremy isn’t house-trained yet) and as such heralds that the next meeting is going to be even bigger and better!
Shame, and if the unexpected and frustrating loss wasn’t enough to work on poor old Ryan’s nerves, I still went on to defeat him in both games of NBA Jam that we sneaked in at the end of the night after the other two had left. It didn’t even help when he cherry-picked his team for the second game… :)