USA Team

Ray in Netherlands game (USA won 1-0)

The tournament was held at the practice facility of the Real Madrid soccer team
[CLICK] for a virtual tour of the facilities

There were 12 teams divided into two six team brackets.

Our USA team played in the bracket with:

England, Netherlands, Mexico, Russia, and a team called Legends (a second team from Spain). We later played Spain in the quarter finals.

The other bracket had:

Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic and Japan.

Our team had 12 players, but one showed up with an injured calf, and was not able to play after trying in the first two games. That left us with 11 (no subs). Most of the guys are younger than I am (I may have been the oldest player in the tournament). We did borrow two players from other teams for one preliminary game and for the quarter final to help as subs.

The format was 5 short games (20 minutes) for each team against the other teams in the bracket. In the preliminary round, ties were left as ties. 4 of the 6 teams in each bracket advanced into the quarter finals. Here and afterwards, ties were broken by penalty kicks.

We started off playing very well against England (probably our best played game). However we missed shots and they scored one goal and got another on an "own goal" (our player accidentally kicked the ball into our goal.

Next we beat Netherlands 1-0 against a hard playing team.

Then we tied Mexico 0-0. Mexico eventually ended up 2nd

Then we tied Russia 0-0 in a hard-fought game.

Finally we tied the Legends team 0-0.

In our bracket, the top four of six teams had one win, one loss and three ties, for 6 points each. Our USA team finished fourth, based on goal differential.

So we advanced to play the number one team in the other bracket (Spain). We tied Spain due to outstanding play by our goalie and went to penalty kicks to decide who would advance to the semi-finals.

In the shot-out, our goalie did well, guessing the direction of every kick, but just missing making any stops. We did well except for one kick which went wide of the goal.

So we lost 5-4 on penalty kicks and were eliminated. If we had advanced into the final 4 we would have played two more games since there was a consolation game for third place.

France won (they had many subs) and the Czech Republic ended in 3rd.

So all in all we did well, getting ties against the 2nd place team (Mexico) and the 4th place team (Spain).