Morgans 2, Ginger 1 - a reading (on YouTube)
And now, your sports update: In the final round of the best-of-three competition, the wild ginger in the Morgans' backyard has been eliminated from the tournament on aggregate, 2-1.
You may remember the quick growing vegetation scored an easy win in the first round of play by deploying an often seen but difficult to counter surprise "mold defense" effectively neutralizing half the Morgan team. With no substitutes available, they were forced to play shorthanded the remainder of the match. Wild ginger took a bit of a mauling, but nothing it couldn't recover from given time.
In round two the Morgans came in prepared and dug out the invasive weed's visible defense in a hard day's hacking and sawing. Though team Morgan tried to soften up team Ginger for the next match with their newly acquired striker, Roundup, the weedy herb shrugged off his spray of shots. But the Morgans held onto their early goal for an eventual, but not decisive victory.
In the weeks leading up to this final confrontation, both sides rested their key players. Team Ginger's training regimen included digging in under the six-inch gap between the chainlink and wood fencing bordering the pitch, possibly thinking it had found a home-field advantage having detected a weakness in the Morgans' previous attacks.
In round three both teams pulled out all the stops. Team Ginger hunkered down in a bunker defense, while team Morgan pondered their best strategy for an attack. The wild root deployed mildly effective carpenter ant midfield formation, followed by a quick counterattack from a ringer on loan from team Wolf Spider, sending half of team Morgan into her screaming wiggly dance (sometimes confused with her victory celebration). She toppled into the remaining Roundup, effectively sidelining him for the remainder of the game. By halftime, team Ginger had once again fended of countless shots from the Morgans' heavy-handed, ax-wielding strikers. Team Morgan seemed on the brink of collapse from exhaustion and the heat.
After what can only be described as an amazing motivational speech from their coach, team Morgan returned to the pitch reinvigorated and with a novel new strategy. Dropping back some 6000 years, they employed a formation that at first team Ginger didn't recognize but soon realized it couldn't counter unless team Morgan's fitness gave out once again in the noontime heat. But that was not to be. Hamstrung in its earlier attempt at digging in by the groundskeeper's overnight undercutting, the wild ginger could find little purchase on the pitch in the second half. Just before penalty kicks would have decided the final outcome, the Morgans' rediscovered formation (nicknamed "The Lever") finally carried the day.
Next up for team Morgan: a classic matchup with their cross-yard rival, team Sprinkler. This one promises to be a long, muddy slog of a campaign.
And that's your sports update.
You may remember the quick growing vegetation scored an easy win in the first round of play by deploying an often seen but difficult to counter surprise "mold defense" effectively neutralizing half the Morgan team. With no substitutes available, they were forced to play shorthanded the remainder of the match. Wild ginger took a bit of a mauling, but nothing it couldn't recover from given time.
In round two the Morgans came in prepared and dug out the invasive weed's visible defense in a hard day's hacking and sawing. Though team Morgan tried to soften up team Ginger for the next match with their newly acquired striker, Roundup, the weedy herb shrugged off his spray of shots. But the Morgans held onto their early goal for an eventual, but not decisive victory.
In the weeks leading up to this final confrontation, both sides rested their key players. Team Ginger's training regimen included digging in under the six-inch gap between the chainlink and wood fencing bordering the pitch, possibly thinking it had found a home-field advantage having detected a weakness in the Morgans' previous attacks.
In round three both teams pulled out all the stops. Team Ginger hunkered down in a bunker defense, while team Morgan pondered their best strategy for an attack. The wild root deployed mildly effective carpenter ant midfield formation, followed by a quick counterattack from a ringer on loan from team Wolf Spider, sending half of team Morgan into her screaming wiggly dance (sometimes confused with her victory celebration). She toppled into the remaining Roundup, effectively sidelining him for the remainder of the game. By halftime, team Ginger had once again fended of countless shots from the Morgans' heavy-handed, ax-wielding strikers. Team Morgan seemed on the brink of collapse from exhaustion and the heat.
After what can only be described as an amazing motivational speech from their coach, team Morgan returned to the pitch reinvigorated and with a novel new strategy. Dropping back some 6000 years, they employed a formation that at first team Ginger didn't recognize but soon realized it couldn't counter unless team Morgan's fitness gave out once again in the noontime heat. But that was not to be. Hamstrung in its earlier attempt at digging in by the groundskeeper's overnight undercutting, the wild ginger could find little purchase on the pitch in the second half. Just before penalty kicks would have decided the final outcome, the Morgans' rediscovered formation (nicknamed "The Lever") finally carried the day.
Next up for team Morgan: a classic matchup with their cross-yard rival, team Sprinkler. This one promises to be a long, muddy slog of a campaign.
And that's your sports update.
© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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(Posted 8/10/11 for the 4th anniversary of Noddfa Imaginings).
A fair amount of cleanup in this one to reinforce the theme.
Back when this one was written, we still had cable and enjoyed spending our Saturday afternoons watching soccer games. I typed this one out during a slow English Premier League as we recovered from the morning's yardwork. In the Champion's League competitions we'd watched the previous few years (we watched the
2006 final from Cardiff in a Welsh pub), the later rounds are decided by an aggregate score based on home and away matches played two weeks apart.
If you ever feel the desire to plant wild ginger, I advise you to resist the urge. Our neighbor had planted a batch about a year before on his side of the fence, then decided to dig it out the next summer as it was too invasive. Too late for us, as it had already colonized our side of the fence in a three-by-three foot section. It creates a mat of tangled roots and vegetation at least a hand's span deep. It mostly shrugged off repeated applications of Roundup. So we resorted to shovel, ax and saw territory for three solid days over the course of several months to remove it. In the end, we hacked it into managable sections and levered each out with a steel clawed rake.
Picture notes:
ReplyDeleteKaren took this picture last Sunday especially for this message. First, she tried to get the ax in the dappled sun in the early afternoon, but the bark on the stump came out too bright. So she waited for evening, hoping for long, deeper shadows. Unfortunatley, by then it was overcast. Which worked out as it provided her with even light. In post, she added some vibrance, then brought out the color in the ax blade and hande, and finally blurred and dimmed the background to simulate a depth-of-field. Yes, Photoshop is her bestest friend.