Post-game analysis with Daphne

You get out of the locker room in a hurry, rinsing off and changing into some fresh clothes. You’re just about to leave the pitch when you spot Daphne at the far end, messing with a camera on a tripod. You jog over to her side, and the Japanese captain of your team looks up at you.

“Hello Alex,” she says. “Were you interested in helping with the post-game analysis? I could use a hand.”

Oh, so that’s what the camera was for. But did you just get roped into this, and can you say no? Wait, why would you even want to say no?

“Yeah, that’s cool,” you say. Then, looking sheepish: “Only… I’m a bit hungry for lunch and I don’t know if I could make it another hour without food.”

Daphne laughs, her dark eyes lighting up in an adorable way.

“I’ll order lunch for the two of us and we can review the tapes in the film studies screening rooms,” she says. “Have you tried the Viet place around here?”

“I haven’t. But if it’s any good, I’d like to change that,” you smile.

The screening room is like a mini-theatre, three rows of chairs set in front of a big screen. Daphne’s hooked her laptop up to the projector in the back, putting in the SD card from the game today. The two of you munch on bánh mìs, watching the game play out.

The first couple minutes are a painful affair.

“That’s the first goal,” you say, stating the obvious as you watch the ball fly into the net. “We just weren’t big enough to stop some of these plays.”

Daphne pauses the video and rewinds a couple seconds, back to the moment when Charlie lost the aerial duel.

“It’s tempting to blame our mistakes on things out of our control,” she nods. “But there are always things that we can work on.”

She hits play on the video, and pauses it a split second after the Smashmouth woman has headed the ball. It’s a blur, flying towards the goal, and Keegan’s still standing there, watching the ball.

“See? Keegan reacted slow. If he starts moving the moment the ball connects with her head—even before, preparing for the possibility that Charlie loses the header—he could save it.”

“Yeah, I see now,” you nod, taking a bite out of your sandwich.

“But this wasn’t the only thing,” she says, rewinding the video further. “Look how this play began. Notice anything?”

You pause, staring at the players on the screen, the position of the ball. You think back to what it felt like to be there on the pitch in that moment, visualizing different possibilities. Could Charlie have tried for a tackle here? No. Katie was too far away to do anything but mark number six, Khloe was behind you, which means...

“I should have cut in here,” you say, pointing at the screen. “I could have stopped the ball before it got somewhere more dangerous.”

“Very good,” Daphne smiles, nodding at you. “Now, for the harder question. Why didn’t you? How will you make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

You take a second to think, chewing on your sandwich. Daphne nibbles on her own, taking precise, triangular bites out of her food.

“I was overwhelmed here,” you say. “I thought he was going for a pass to number six, another play like the one we just saw, and I was trying to intercept that. Was that wrong?” You frown, and rewatch the short clip. “Yeah. Khloe was coming in to support me, so even though letting a pass through to six would have been bad, it was less bad than what happened, and Katie had that angle covered anyways. Meaning next time… I need to adapt better to my teammates’ movements?”

You nod, satisfied with that takeaway. Daphne too, gives you a nod of approval.

“It’s a lesson you already knew,” she says. “It was just hard to see in that split-second. I find that talking through it after the fact, being explicit and cognisant of what happened… it helps the subconscious react to such situations faster in the future.”

“Rewatching this match, all the mistakes that I made become so much more obvious,” you say, leaning in closer to Daphne. “But funnily enough, I don’t see anything you could improve on.”

“Most of the play didn’t directly involve me,” she says, taking your compliment with a quiet smile. “I still have much to work on. But we should move on to tactics. I had a couple ideas during the match, and I would like to hear what you think about them.”

An hour and a half later, you’ve reviewed most of the match, and your head is spinning with all of the diagrams and plays that Daphne has been sketching out. It’s an interesting exercise, trying to figure out from the video how differently certain plays would have gone if people had made slightly different runs, or different passes, or marked someone else, but by the end of it, you feel like you have a much better sense of not just the individual tactical decisions going into each play, but also the general direction that Daphne wants to take the team in.

Speaking of which, over the course of the review, you’ve managed to get closer to Daphne—both physically with the way you’re sitting against one another, but also on a deeper, emotional level. Where Daphne was once almost purposefully playing into the role of a captain and teammate, or a coach and player, maintaining a certain amount of professional distance that would come with the distinction, by the end, you’ve got her loosened up a bit, laughing and talking on the same level.

“So that’s why I thought you should have gone for the right wing instead,” you say, pointing at one of the key moments during the final minutes of the match.

“The more I think about it, the more I see it your way,” Daphne says, slowly nodding. She smiles at you, leaning back against you, her hair falling over your shoulder. “This was good. We figured out a lot of things to take into our next game. Thank you.”

“The pleasure was mine,” you smile, happy for the progress that you’ve made in this short time.

Daphne +20