Thursday, July 4 • 6:30 PM • Al Lang Stadium • St. Petersburg, FL Mercifully the last game of the Spring. Shore is out, so Ricardo Lopes will lead the club in the latest Coastal Cup tilt. Can he defy the odds and deliver what has so far been impossible in the modern Strikers-Rowdies series? A win in Tampa Bay? Those of us going sure hope so lol.
I'd be making my first trip to Tampa to watch a Strikers/Rowdies tilt since I was a kid....if they'd stop putting this game on the frakkin 4th of July! Stupid Rowdies! If the 4th is such a big ticket slaes game for them, they should schedule frakkin Edmonton, because they'll get good crowds no matter when the Strikers come to town, and it wouldn't make it such a pain in the arse for the only true derby there is in the league. Someone's got to talk some sense into the Rowdies and the league on this. Anyway, judging by the effort I saw this past Saturday, I'm not expecting much. One thing I do expect is to see Walter Restrepo back in the starting lineup where he belongs. One of Shore's biggest problems was his never-ending merry go round of lineup changes, and how he apparently decided week by week who should be playing. Whoever ran the most laps and was still going full steam on your final wind sprint of the day isn't how to determine who plays at the professional level. It's who are your best players, and gives you the best chance to win. Losing Foley and Sparky were huge blows to our offense, but he compensated by playing his old pal JJ who did nothing all year, and don't even get me started on Dimitrov. I am hoping our next coach does a better job with the lineup. I'm imagining an attacking group that includes Sparky, Paulo Jr, Restrepo, Foley, and let's see what this kid Willis has got since we traded away a proven goal scorer for him. It just goes to show you the only reason for the trade by Shore was to get Herron out, since we wouldn't even play Willis except for a few garbage time minutes at the end of games. I don't blame the kid for being frustrated about it. Ok, that got to be a bit more of a rant than I intended. LOL Just utterly frustrated with this team, and the absurd schedule format. Hoping for things to turn around in the second half...
Why can't the Strikers get a 4th of July game at home? When I was a kid (early 80's), the Strikers almost always had a 4th of July night home game...followed by fireworks. Lockhart was filled to the brim with 20k fans. Those were some of my best memories of the first Strikers (along with them doing a soccer clinic for my team in West Kendall).
They played 6 out of 7 years on the 4th at home(never vs. TB), and the only year they didn't was 1977 when they played the Rowdies, at home, on July 1st. In fact, the first time the Strikers EVER played the Rowdies on July 4th was 2011. Dunno where they get this tradition BS from. I imagine they can't do the 4th at Lockhart these days due some kind of to FAA/Homeland Security laws about fireworks near an airport. Probably something that wasn't around in the 70s.