Hello from Israel,

Today is Thursday, July 2nd and we just played our 2nd friendly game. This time it was against an Under 16 team (Gadna Yahuda) just outside Tel Aviv. We tied 1:1. We played ok today, but we are still doing way too many fancy things and dribbling way too much. Once we can get them to understand that soccer is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread and not caviar, we will be pretty good. They are still trying to do way too much on the ball instaed of 1 or 2 touches and then pass and move off of it for the return pass. They must understand it is the simple type of play that will win games and not the complicated things. For you see soccer is really a simple game! Everyone played today and most of the starters only played the first half with the reserves playing all of the 2nd half. The score was 0:0 at the half with us having almost all the play, but just could not score. In the 2nd half, we made a very bad mistake and they counter attacked us with numbers and scored to make it 0:1. Late in the 2nd half we had a corner kick and we scored off it to tie the game.

All in all it was a pretty good performance, knowing that this was only the 3rd day this team has played or trained together.

Tomorrow morning, we will play the Under 19 team again at 9 AM. Hopefully, we will show better this time. At 4 PM we will have another training session to warmdown. Starting Saturday, we will only have 1 training session per day, as we will begin our touring of Israel and all the historical places that we are anxiously waiting to see and enjoy.

We will post again tomorrow after our morning game. I hope everyone is doing well.

So, from Israel, good-night,

Preston and Sean