What looked like a dominant performance from Australia now feels like one of their most uneasy in recent months. Tournament football is like a fun-house mirror - it warps and magnifies and refracts, sometimes bending entire games out of shape. "It's obviously a frustrating result, but there's a lot of positives to take out of the game," she says.Īnd she's right, there were a lot of positives.Īustralia dominated Nigeria on paper: they had 28 shots to 11, 15 corners to 2, 467 passes to 270, 27 final-third entries to 6, and 43 touches in the opposition box to 15. The hot tears that spilled down her cheeks moments earlier in the dressing-room are threatening to flood back and she needs to default to the script they've all memorised for moments like this. This is where she takes the quivering half-breath, her voice beginning to catch in her throat. We possessed the ball well, we moved them around a lot, we created chances and put them under a lot of pressure in their back third." "But for majority of the game, we played well. "There was big moment right before half-time where we gave up a goal. is to have their product a part of every field sports uniform from little league to professional."I just think it was moments," she says professionally, looking past dozens of pairs of pecking eyes at the cold grey wall behind us. Rodney Hall not only makes the athletic shoe covers for football they are made for all field sports. Spatz are made of the same durable uniform fabric and are available in many of the same colors. Yet, Instead of the hassle of applying and removing tape, his zippered design enables easy on and off that saves time. He developed a form fitted shoe covering designed to function in the same supportive and protective capacity as taping. It was during this time he was revisited with the problems involved with taping cleats. While completing his degree, Rodney coached football at his high school alma mater. He went on to play four years of collegiate football and later earned his BS., Administration, from Central Michigan University. As a high school player he earned All State honors from Ferndale High School in 1989, and was heavily recruited by several colleges and universities. Rodney, a Detroit native, is a veteran football player since he began his football career with the Detroit Cobras Little League team at the age of seven. In order to alleviate the problems associated with taping, Spatz were developed by Rodney Hall. Since most high schools don't allow cleats to be worn inside the building, athletes would have to crawl to and from the locker- room while their shoes were taped! Consequently, players would miss pre game meetings, and trainers would be swamped with a lot of extra work. Trainers were using an excessive amount of time to tape up the shoes before the game and after the game to cut the tape off. The biggest problem he noticed on the team and through out his own football career, was lost time. The idea came from the problems that taping and re-taping the cleats were causing. Rodney came up with an innovation to replace the taping of cleats. Rodney Hall, an assistant football coach at Ferndale High School, was familiar with the process of taping cleats, since he had taped his cleats in high school and in college. Athletic Trainers came up with patterns to apply the tape so that it would give some support as well as keep shoestrings from coming undone. Taped cleats were seen on football players from little leaguers to professional players. Athletic Trainers came up with a saying, "If you want ankle support tape your ankles not your shoes".īy this time, however, 'spatting' or getting 'spatted' up before games had become popular, giving the players the perception of having a new pair of cleats on at every game. In fact, so much tape would be needed on the cleat to insure support, that it would resemble a cast! This became obvious as many players continued to have ankle sprains. Although players continued to 'spat' their shoes on into the 80's, doctors and athletic trainers, who felt that they did not provide adequate support, frowned upon taping as a means of ankle support. Spats started in the early 1970's when football players would tape the outside of their cleats for ankle support.
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