Crow, Fernandez Enjoy Getting Defensive

While they’re joking, needling and poking fun at each other, it’s easy to see there is a lot of mutual respect mixed in.

Kevin Crow and George Fernandez, all-star defenders for the Sockers, enjoy a good laugh off the field. On it, they combine with teammates Ralph Black and Cacho to put a lot of detours in the path of opponents.

On a recent afternoon after practice, Crow and Fernandez got together to shoot the breeze about playing defense in the Major Indoor Soccer League:

Question: You guys seem to be injured less than a lot of players on the Sockers. Is there a reason for that?

Crow: I think we’re fit, which helps. I also think it’s a little bit of the nature of the position. It’s not quite as demanding as the midfield, and you’re not getting kicked as much as forwards. But I think the guys in the back train hard, and I think they take care of themselves.

Q: What about the iron man over here? You’re up to about 117 (now 120) games in a row now, right?

Fernandez: Uh, I don’t know.

Crow: He knows, he knows, he knows.

Fernandez: I don’t know.

Crow: He knows.

Fernandez: Yeah, it’s something like that. I try to keep in shape. I think that’s the key, really. Once you get out of shape, there are so many things that can happen to you.

Crow: I really think it all starts in preseason. If you get hurt in preseason because you’re out of shape . . . it’s like you never catch up.

I think that happens to some players. They take lousy care of themselves into the preseason and they think “OK, I’ll be ready when the season starts.” But they get hurt because they’re carrying 10 extra pounds. The body’s not used to playing with that.

Q: You’ve got quite a few in a row too, don’t you, Kevin? (He had played in 87 in a row before Friday’s game with Kansas City, which he missed to attend his grandmother’s funeral).

Fernandez: He knows, he knows, he knows.

Crow: What am I, like 20 behind you?

Fernandez: Yeah, something like that.

Q: The last one you missed was because you played on the national team?

Fernandez: Oh, I don’t want to hear that.

Crow: You don’t want to hear that because you know I’d destroy you. I’d be up to three hundred and something. I’ve missed one game in eight years because of injury.

Fernandez: That’s amazing.

Q: How do your styles of play contrast?

Fernandez: I’m more aggressive. I take a lot more chances than I think Kevin does. Kevin’s more the laid-back, thinking type.

Crow: I think he’s more of an aggressive, emotional defender. I sit back and read the situation and then kind of decide what I’m going to do.

Socker Coach Ron Newman is asked to assess the technical differences of his four starting defenders.

Of Crow: “He’s great when you have a battle on the board, because he’s got so much strength. I’ve never seen anybody muscle him off the ball. And yet for a big player, he’s got a nice touch.”

Of Fernandez: “He’s got this tremendous courage. He’ll throw himself into the most horrendous shots that I think I’d be ducking.”

Of Black: “He’s hard-nosed. He just doesn’t take any mucking about from anyone. He’s also got a very nice left foot.”

Of Cacho: “He’s got a lot of experience. He can handle people who have got all sorts of tricks up their sleeve. He’s very comfortable with the ball and very deceptive with his passes.”

Q: What’s the most effective way to block a shot?

Crow: You ever see the way he blocks shots?

Fernandez: Come on, man. I’m leading the team. (Fernandez has 76, Crow 70).

Crow: You wouldn’t want to teach any kids this technique. He just lies down. He leans over and his weight gets a little too far going one way, and he ends up lying down.

Fernandez: It takes up more room.

Crow: I’ve always been high on the team in blocked shots. But a lot of that is just because when you play on the defensive power play, especially in the position in the back, their position is the high pressure, to force bad shots and force bad passes. My position is to back them up and to block shots . . . The blocked shots I like are when I block someone else’s man’s shot. Someone else is taking someone on, and I leave my man to block the shot. To me, that’s a good blocked shot.

Q: The defenders on the Sockers always seem to work well together and get in fewer arguments than the rest of the guys. Is there a reason for that?

Crow: The defenders have always been sort of like a little unit. Nobody really cares who starts the game. It doesn’t matter to us. That’s why we’ve always joked when the other guys on the team argue about playing time or who’s not passing who the ball or “I got this assist, you shouldn’t have gotten it.” We sit back and say “Who cares?”

Fernandez: The bottom line is we want to win. We don’t care what it takes.

The Sockers defenders don’t fight among themselves, but Black has never been opposed to getting in a scrape if he feels the situation calls for it. He serves as sort of a bodyguard for the rest of the team.

“I like to mix it up,” Black said. “I don’t care about size or anything. I’ll mix it up, and I don’t care who I mix it up with.

“It’s just the way I was brought up. (San Bruno) was a tough place to grow up. You had to be tough. There were always fights going on and if you couldn’t take care of yourself you’d get killed.”

Three weeks ago in Dallas, Black got into a scuffle with Sidekick defender Doc Lawson, a martial arts expert. Lawson ended up kicking Black in the head. Black says it really didn’t faze him too much.

“I never took karate or nothing,” he said. “But I had a lot of friends who were black belts and all that. A kick to my head doesn’t mean (anything).

“When you get to a point where you blow up, he can stick his black belt up . . .”

Let’s leave it at that, but suffice it to say he didn’t finish the sentence with “on his mantle, next to his MISL championship trophy.”

Black says the defender’s job has become more difficult with elimination of a rule that prohibited a pass from crossing both the red lines and the white midfield line in the air. A defender used to be able to allow a forward to get behind him inside the red line and not worry about a pass being chipped over his head from the other end. He must now be more cautious to prevent opponents from getting one-on-one breakaways.

Black, in his ninth MISL season, has seen a lot of change, which has made it essential for defenders to cultivate good ball-control skills rather than just an aggressive attitude and a pair of strong legs.

“The game’s changed so much,” he said. “Back when I started it wasn’t as skillful. The NASL took some of the good players away. There was a lot more running. Now it’s probably as good as it’s going to get in terms of skill.”

Q: Who is the toughest player in the league to defend?

Crow: Right now I’d probably say Tatu (Dallas) is one of the more difficult ones, especially when he’s hot.

Fernandez: He’s got an unbelievable first step. Low center of gravity, strong and agile. I’ll tell you who gives me problems is (Jan) Goossens (Kansas City). When you try to block his shot, he always comes right back and plays it through your legs.

Q: What is the difference in the way you play now compared with when you first started in the MISL?

Fernandez: It’s all emotion, really, when you’re just starting out.

Crow: Like Don Cogsville (Socker rookie defender). When he goes out he’s running 100 miles an hour right now. In two or three years, you watch, he’ll slow down and pick and choose when to run and when to pressure. I think when you’re young, you tend to get dragged out of position, you mark your man almost too much and don’t back up other people enough. Things like that take time.

Q: Compare playing defense outdoors with defense indoors.

Crow: In this game, you let people take shots because the goals are smaller, and the angles are different than outdoors, where you can’t let a guy shoot because the goals are so big. In outdoors you always want the player to make that pass wide. Here it’s almost better to let a guy take a shot from the top of the box instead of passing to the far post.

Q: What’s the strangest goal you’ve seen the Sockers allow?

Crow: Ade Coker passed a harmless ball back to the keeper from the halfway line. Nobody was even around for 20 or 30 yards, and Alan (Mayer) was in goal. He put his heel up to stop the ball and he took his eye off the ball. His heel was too high and the ball rolled underneath his foot and into the goal. I was laughing so hard. You’re just sitting there saying “No, that didn’t happen.”

Q: What’s the most important thing about playing defense in the MISL?

Fernandez: Communication and confidence in each other. To realize that if you get beat somebody’s going to help you. You have to feel good about that person and not have any qualms about what’s going to happen. Our defenders get along really well. I think we respect each other.

Crow: I think that’s one of the biggest things right there. You’ve got to have respect for the guys you’re playing with. I think the defenders have always respected each other and what we can do. We’re all better at different things. I think everyone’s gotten their share of recognition playing defense as a team.