A Truculent Tone in Vegas

MLK weekend is a prime time for tournaments of all different sports.  I was part of a soccer crowd swarming to a place where hundreds of teams visit each year to play challenging soccer in the Vegas Cup as well as explore the dazzling city of Las Vegas.  These teams are from all over the nation and even a few are from outside of the country.  This offers great variety so you get to play team that you normally wouldn’t.  More often than not, these soccer games become heated.  At least one parent, player, or coach will get aggravated by a call (or calls) the referee made (because a ref can never please everyone.)  Sometimes, depending on how angry people are, a yelling match will result.  I just so happened to hear a particularly interesting verbal quarrel during my team's semi-final game on Monday.  Now this wasn’t going to be a normal game for we were playing La Roca South, a Salt Lake team we regularly play.  For some reason, there is never a dull game when we go up against them.  This was no exception.  One of my teammates had been hit in the face with the ball and our coach was helping her with her bloody nose.  The ref turned around and started the game not realizing the coach and injured player were still on the field.  Our coach got mad and somebody kicked the ball out to stop the game.  The ref and our coach started arguing and then the other team’s coach joined in.  Somewhere in the middle of it the the three of them switched to rapid Spanish that only fluent speakers would understand, but we all got the gist of it.  Fluid, smooth, yet intense and furious at the same time, we could only stare wide-eyed at the blowup enfolding in front of us.  It became worse when the ref kicked our coach out of the game.  One of our other coaches took over.  Long story short, we won, but the ref was mostly one-sided after that and it wasn’t so light hearted or fun anymore.  The ending score was 2-1.  We went on to win the tournament, as you can tell from the picture above.