Monday Morning Report: January 11

• Championship game
• Tale of two halves

I arrived at the Pairs airport in June of 2005 in a red-and-black soccer t-shirt. As I stepped off the plane, the pilot pointed his index finger at the logo on my chest and said "catastroph!" Ordinarily, I would be taken aback when a professional says something so openly derogatory at me. But I immediately agreed with him.

What he was referring to was AC Milan's monumental collapse at the Champions' Leauge Final one month before. They were 3-nil ahead of Liverpool going into the break. They had the game won with genius plays by Kaka and Shevchenko. But Steven "Captain Fantastic" Gerrard came out of the locker room, scored almost immediately, and motivated his team to the spectacular come-back. In the end, Liverpool won in a shoot-out and the "catastroph" was complete.

A similar collapse unfolded for AC D.C. at the Fairfax Sportsplex on Saturday. The only difference was that half the world wasn't watching our game and no Air France pilot would know about it. Playing against an undefeated opponent in the indoor championship game, our first half was brilliant. We played with poise and patience, and we defended tenaciously as a team. We climbed to a 5-nil lead without doing anything unusual....just played our game.

Our monumental collapse started early in the second half. Reasons for it are still unclear to me. Very likely, we felt that we have already won the championship, so we "switched off." As if our team collectively had a stroke and became demented, we simply forgot how to play team defense. Good-to-brilliant all season, our defensive positioning was atrocious. It was like no one wanted to defend the 5-nil lead with 20" to go. Was everyone looking out for their own glory in scoring a goal in the championship game?

We tried to make some defensive switches at 5-3 and that didn't work. The game was balanced at 5-5 for about 4-5 minutes, as we finally regained some defensive composure. Then it was back-and-forth a bit but we played poorly again at the end. The story is told with a play when the score was 8-7. Our opponent attacked with one striker. He shot the ball and it rebounded off the base wall. One would have thought that with only 2" to go, we would defend with all we've got. But yet, the shooter got his own rebound, and put it in our net. And the final score was 9-7.

Although it's easy to blame our defenders for this collapse and for letting in 9 goals in 25", defending is really a team effort. We can only win if we realize that. We also need to understand that the game is however long the clock says, and if we switch off, we can lose, whatever the score may be at halftime. Letting in 3 goals when we were leading by 5 is not the end of the world. We have to be mentally tenacious and keep playing the game!

Football is >50% mental. Our players who stepped on the field in the second half are identical to those in the first, with the same skills, same strength and same knowledge of the game. Fatigue was not a factor. Our performance in the second half was clearly a mental issue, not a physical one. We'll have to work on that aspect of our team in the future.

There may well be a silver lining, however. After the "Catastroph of 2005," AC Milan faced Liverpool again in the CL Final two years later. This time, they won. Let's hope the same storyline unfolds for AC D.C. as we enter the second session of the winter indoor season.