“No Pulisic? No Problem!” USA on G Street

June 28, 20263 Comments

“USA! USA! USA!” they were all singing. It was just after lunchtime, the Juneteenth holiday so we had the day off work, and the pedestrianized block of G Street in downtown Davis was full of soccer fans, most of them dressed in USA gear to cheer on USMNT in their group match against Australia. Win this, and they go through to the knockouts. There was a big screen set up, and loads of people on their lawn chairs, which every soccer-mom and soccer-dad has in the back of their car. It was hot, and very sunny, so I sketched under the cover of my hat and some hastily applied sunscreen on the back of my legs, drawing on the last page of my sketchbook which I had pre-splashed with some ‘Inktense’ paints. I had to change positions a couple of times, and then just headed into the shade completely. There were some Australians, but the US were playing in front of a soccer-crazy Seattle crowd and were pretty dominant, even though their Main Man Christian Pulisic was not playing; “No Pulisic, No Problem!” announced the excited commentator. When they scored, a massive cheer erupted, and chants of “USA! USA! USA!” echoed across downtown. I wondered to myself if anyone would start replying “USB! USB!” and thought that might be a good thing to sing at a Chargers game, and then the US got a second goal, scored by someone called A. Freeman, the #16. I thought to myself, they have missed a trick there, A. Freeman should have been Number 6. (As in “I am NOT a NUMBER, I am A. FREEMAN!”). Someone I know (Adie) was wearing an Alexei Lalas USA ’94 shirt, #22, so he had to go into the sketchbook. He had not grown the beard (funny story, right, I actually did grow the beard back in 1999 mostly as a laugh but also partly to annoy someone). I always wanted that kit back in 1994. I did consider wearing the one USA national shirt that I own, the very smart one from 2006, but the thing about shirts from the 2000s is they don’t really work on 2020s Pete. It is curious that my football shirts from the big and baggy ’90s still fit me but nothing from about 2002-2010. Oh well. We didn’t actually stick around for the second half, instead going to McDonalds for some massively overpriced chicken nuggets that came with commemorative World Cup cups with players on them (We got Pulisic and Lamine Yamal). We watched the rest at home, but it was a done deal and the USMNT topped their group with a game to spare in this unusually designed World Cup format. They would go on to play against Turkey and lose late on, but it was a meaningless match, if any game is really meaningless. They will play again in the Round of 32 on Wednesday against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the big screen will be out on G Street again.

I had gone down to G Street a little early, to check out the Davis Soccer Fest. This has been set up to happen before the US games, and also before the World Cup Final, where there are lots of soccer related activities, including a big dartboard where you can kick a ball at it to score points (I didn’t give it a go but I sketched it). It is organized by Davis community Soccer, who are a new group in town run by many of the same people who have run soccer in Davis for a while now, from the AYSO and AYSO United organizations, of which I was a member; I coached for years and was one of the original coaching team for United but retired in 2022, though I am still on the Davis World Cup committee, and design the World Cup logos and medals. Davis Community Soccer started this year, though it was a surprise to me (since it is effectively replacing Fall AYSO this year, though Davis AYSO has said it’s not going away) and I’ve not had a chance to talk to anyone involved about it all yet, but good luck to them, I hope it’s a success. I like their logo, it reminds me of the one I designed for the 2022 Davis World Cup a bit, I like that retro font. It’s nice to see them create fun stuff like this as well, and so as I sketched I did get a chance to chat with Sam and Adam who I’ve not caught up with in a while. They had a tent pitched up where kids could get soccer tattoos. It was a really fun event for kids, with others playing soccer tennis further up the street.

Here are some more of the crowd. I drew the USA fans there while I was stood in the shade on the sidelines. That reminds me, the USA will celebrate its 250th anniversary this July 4, I don’t know if you heard. I may actually try to sketch the fireworks this year, to mark the occasion, I will need some more gel pens to sketch on dark paper. While 250 doesn’t seem that old to a Brit, it’s worth getting a nice cake for, and I never liked it when I would turn 30, 40, most recently 50 and there is always someone older going, hah you’re so young, wait until you’re my age. For July 4 I might even try to squeeze into that 2006 USA shirt if I can. Below, some of the other shirts on display, a Scottish fan in a kilt waiting, Scotland were playing later that day (spoiler alert, they lost the game, but they won over the city of Boston, and that’s what really matters). There was a young lad in the 2002 Brazil shirt, I think he was a USA fan but that’s a great top. The guy next to him was in a red USA away kit from about 2011, that was a nice one. There were a lot of other kits on display, but overwhelmingly the current USA home kit was most common, the one with the red wavy horizontal stripes like a flag. Will they win it this year, the actual World Cup? I mean, nobody really thinks so, because they just don’t do they, but well, they could. Their group was not hard, and their route to the quarter finals is not exactly filled with heavyweight teams, and with the big West Coast crowds chanting “USA! USA!” (except for those few confused LA Charger fans singing “USB-C!”) they just might pull it off. The Women’s team have done it enough times. If they do, well it’ll be ‘Hydration Breaks’ everywhere. Maybe when they have won ‘FIFA’ as they call it, they can get rid of penalty shootouts and replace them with that thing they used to do in the early years of MLS, when they would have someone run from the halfway line to go one on one with the keeper, the best Americanization sport has ever seen. But that won’t happen because as we all know deep down, this year, 60 years on, Its Coming Home.

Watching Haaland in Soccer and Lifestyle

June 28, 20261 Comment

The World Cup continues. Still during that first round of group games, I went to the local football shirt shop, Soccer and Lifestyle, to watch the second half of Norway vs Iraq. I sketched the store; the last time I had sketched inside was in the previous location was also during a World Cup, but back in 2014, twelve years ago. That is a long time ago. I drew this all while the game was going on, but coloured it in at home. There was a woman in there wearing a yellow and green Mali shirt, with ‘F Kanoute’ on the back, which I though was incredible. I really liked Freddie Kanouté, who played for Spurs for a brief period in the mid 2000s, and I told them I actually saw him play and even score, at White Hart Lane in 2004. There are a lot of good shirts in that shop. I bought my shirt for the tournament there, the Japan away kit, a couple of weeks ago. That one is white with a black collar but has really nice colourful pinstripes. They were out of the USA shirts already, they had sold out before the first USA game. There is a ‘Soccer Fest’ on G St before every US game, and a big screen is set up to watch them. We saw the second game there (I’ll post the sketches later). The USA home shirt this year is a zany affair, red and white made to look a bit like the flag waving, and be reminiscent of the amazing 1994 kit. I don’t like the 2026 one much, but if they do well, it’ll probably end up iconic. The game that I saw in the shop was a bit one-sided, with Norway being the one side, not surprising since Haaland is on the team.

So, flashback to twelve years ago, watching France vs Switzerland…

Hop you are enjoying the World Cup. It’s big and bloated and there are too many games, and I hate the ‘hydration breaks’ which are just blatantly obviously advert breaks (well done America, you broke soccer), but there have been some good moments already. Messi closed out the group stage with goal #6 for him, and DR Congo won their first World Cup game (against Uzbekistan admittedly) to qualify for the knockouts. The ‘Round of 32’ started today, and Canada beat South Africa with a late winner. There are a lot of games still to come, a lot of ‘hydration breaks’, a lot of Beckham and Messi adverts…

Davis World Cup 2025

August 3, 2025August 3, 2025Leave a comment

It’s not May in Davis without the annual youth soccer bonanza, the Davis World Cup. I am on the committee for this tournament (I design the logos, medals, pins, t-shirts and I update the website; all the hard work is done by everyone else). The committee has had many of the same members for a number of years now so we’re a pretty efficient team; all our offspring have either aged out or no longer play regular AYSO to even take part in the tournament themselves; I last coached at the tournament in 2018 (with the Spurs!), and my own teenager last played the Davis World Cup in 2019 (for the Dawgs, they were a nice team with a great coach). Above, I sketched all the flags displayed outside the AYSO headquarters in Community Park. This is what I love about the Davis World Cup. Each team that applies (and they come from all over northern California, plus we always get a few from Nevada) gets assigned a country, and they get the flag of that country and are encouraged to offer their opponents little gifts or such associated with that country. So for example if you are Spain, you give a little keyring that says ‘Spain on it, or if you are Uzbekistan, you give a little keyring that says ‘Uzbekistan’ on it, and so on. Actually teams get way more thoughtful and creative than that, giving out candies or trinkets, when my team Spurs played we were assigned as Serbia, so I made little keyrings with ‘Serbia’ on them (along with information about the country and the Serbian alphabet, showing you how to write your name in Serbian). Fun stuff. I coached another AYSO Select team in 2020 (the Titans; I still wear the t-shirt as it was one of my best logos) and I was really hoping (as a committee member) to maybe be able to pick a country for our team, probably Belgium to give out chocolates, probably Ireland due to the family provenance of both coaches, but I really wanted Italy because I was hoping to have the team sing the anthem before each game, they have the best anthem. However, we never got that far because 2020 turned into the 2020 we know and can’t forget, so the tournament was cancelled that year (and I recycled the retro Top of the Pops style logo for the 2022 event). I enjoy making the logo, but I spend an inordinate amount of time faffing about with the design during the year before. I went this year for a more playful design again, using a similar kid-like graffiti style lettering that I’ve used for some of our old teams (like the ‘Duh’, the first AYSO Select team my son played on, coming 4th in the 2017 tournament at U10 level). I went with a ‘splat’ background full of flags, after my friend spilled some milk at a cafe in Nob Hill and I really liked the shape it made on the table. I’ll have that, I thought. So the logo below was born. It was a hit with the t-shirt vendor. I got very excited when I first drew the little cartoon water tower on my iPad, and abandoned the cartoon cow theme I was originally going with. Maybe I’ll resurrect that for next year, if I don’t go with a classic retro World Cup style again.

Some of the cartoon cows came back for the Keeper Wars logo though, as you can see in the sticker design below. This went through a lot of versions too, one of them looking like an explosion in hyperspace. One of the balls says “Footy Footy Footy” which is a reference to the Adam and Joe “Footy Song” from the 90s (watch that here). Keeper Wars is a fun tournament, though I didn’t make it out to watch it this year. While my wife did a lot of running around from field to field, I was at home a lot as the guy in the chair, to be on hand for any last-second website updates (which I had to do during that sketch at the top, but I only live about three minutes away by bike).

And below, here are some of the medals, pins, stickers, coins and the committee t-shirt. The medal came out particularly well this year, it’s my favourite one yet. If in doubt, always add some stars, that’s my design rule. Splats don’t always work.

Here is how the t-shirt logo looked, as sold by the on-site vendor. So cool seeing so many people lining up to get them. It was cool to see someone running in one of my older shirts from 2022 the other week. What’s even cooler is when I see people wearing an AYSO or DWC shirt I have designed and I show them the original concept drawings on my iPad.

And here are pins from the previous World Cups I have designed. I love this year’s one, I kept the pin just black and white.

Glory Glory in Bilbao

June 22, 2025Leave a comment

Well this happened a month ago – Tottenham Hotspur finally won a trophy after 17 years without one. That’s the stat, 17 years without a trophy, as if to say the football was good 17 years ago, good this year, and not in between, when that’s not really the case. But we won the Europa League, the third time we have won that particular trophy (the first was in 1972, the second in 1984 which I still remember). The final wasn’t pretty, and I had to be at home that day to watch it, but we beat Manchester United 1-0 and that’s that. All those years of scintillating exciting football and nearly getting there with one of the best Spurs teams I’ve ever seen, followed by a few years of that team declining and leaving and chopping and changing the managers and styles, the Contes and Mourinhos boring us to death, and then we bring in Big Ange Postecoglou, an Australian of Greek origin with big bold ideas who “always wins something in his second season” and changed the whole style to something far more attacking and fun to watch. It started well, top after his first ten games, the stadium singing Robbie Williams songs to him, saying “look Mate” a lot and looking at the floor when answering questions, that cough and those sighs, but then we kept getting so many injuries, and he would not change his cavalier style. We ended up fifth, but teams were figuring us out. So the second season, and we never got off the ground in the league, although we did beat the champions Man City away 4-0, everyone else beat us, except United who were terrible. Somehow we managed to stay alive in the Europa League – the new format helped, no heavyweight teams dropping down from the Champions League meant the most difficult team we faced was Eintracht Frankfurt. Even Manchester United making the final was a bit of a fluke, they were even more terrible than us this season (though in the end they finished a couple of spots above us, we did beat them four times over the course of the season which is amazing). So we go into the final, the teams 16th and 17th in the Premier League, the worst version of Spurs and the worst version of United I have ever seen in my lifetime, teams with records that in any other season would probably have seen them relegated, and yet one of them would get into the Champions League?! That is the prize of winning this easier Europa League, and we did it, with a goal scored by accident by Brennan Johnson, and an off the line clearance by Van De Ven that will go down in the history books and probably some of the physics books, and just for now, I don’t care about being 17th, about losing more games in one season than ever before, we won the cup. Bilbao will live on forever for us Spurs fans. It was like the end of Lord of the Rings. We had beaten Bodo in the semi before Pippin a sorry Man U in Bilbao by a nice goal and getting Merry at the Lane, Baggin’ the trophy and opening more doors as we soar on to the Champions League. The return of the Kings. My brother and nephew were watching at the Spurs stadium on the big screens set up there, and it sounds like it was a fun night. I felt relieved more than anything, after the disappointment of 2019. But a trophy is just a trophy. We came 17th in the league, we kept losing so many games – I like watching Spurs win games, and entertain as well. Big Ange who does not change his style refused to change it in the league, and we nearly got relegated, but for some reason changed it in the Europa and we won the thing. It was fun seeing the big parade, and now we can get all those people off our backs who say we never win trophies (Newcastle can do the same now too, and it’s been way longer for them). But 17th man, it ain’t good enough. So less than two weeks later, Big Ange got the sack. I’m fine with that, he would have been sacked by October anyway. He leaves as a trophy winner, no hard feelings, now we start again with our new guy, Thomas Frank. Come on you Spurs!

the 2024 davis world cup…

May 26, 2024May 26, 2024Leave a comment

Today is the second day of the annual AYSO Davis World Cup, a youth soccer tournament held every year in parks around Davis. The HQ is in Community Park, and we’ve got all the flags up and everything. My job on the committee is designing the logo and medals and t-shirts etc, and looking after the website. this year I went for a retro theme with a toned down colour scheme, I was happy with how it looks on the shirts and medals. On the Saturday morning my wife (who handles ordering all the tournament swag and does more general committee help) and I went over to the building to help with the set-up, and later on I sketched the building (above). The weather was a little cooler than it’s been but still warm and sunny, with a breeze kicking up the allergens. The scouts were nearby, their job is collecting trash and bringing water/Gatorade to the volunteers. There are a load of volunteers involved (we’re all volunteers), from the committee through all the field marshals and gophers and the many many referees, and of course all the coaches, I used to be one. I don’t think I miss the coaching, although it was most fun on the tournaments like this, and this one is special – every team is given a country that they become for the tournament, they get a flag and are expected to have little gifts based on that country to give to players on the opposing team. The only time I coached at the tournament was at the U10 level, as my (very good) U12 team had to stop playing in March 2020 because of that Covid that happened. I’ve been a parent a few times, and been on the committee since 2019, drawing up so many logos. Today I was back in the building helping sort out all the medals (first place is so shiny!) which will be given out tomorrow. I had a little lunch and sketched the inside of the building:

Here are the Davis World Cup logos for this year:

It’s the whole three-day weekend, I’m hoping that it all continues to go smoothly, and that all the teams enjoy it!

sunday kickaround

January 29, 2024Leave a comment

While out one Sunday during a break in the rain, I noticed a load of men playing soccer on the field by the university. I’ve passed by them before and noticed a few good football shirts among them, this time I decided to watch for a bit, and since it’s been a while, I tried sketching the players in motion. I say in motion, I mean it wasn’t as fast paced and fluid as the old AYSO United games played by quick teenagers, and on a smaller field, but sketching with my black fountain pen I did still struggle to get the ink moving along into people shapes. This was a good test of that pen, not so much the brown ink but the carbon platinum pen which I have often shied away from while out and about, it was a bit of hard work. So I got my thicker Zebra pen and added some thicker more defined outlines to some of them, and that pen felt more comfortable. It’s funny, a couple of years ago I’d have probably felt I could join in and make an impact, but these days since quitting soccer coaching and not having a ball at my feet I shy away from it more. I had a kickaround with my son a few weeks back and my foot hurt kicking the ball, that had never happened before. I’m not completely unfit (though I’m taking my time getting into training for the upcoming runs I’m doing) but definitely a bit shy when it comes to sports. Many of the guys were younger but a lot of the guys were a good bit older than me. There was one bloke who was a bit shouty at his team-mates, even though this was just a kickabout he seemed to yell at them for not choosing the right pass or not switching play or whatever, though he seemed happy to lump it off the field. Still it was good seeing all the playing styles, but I just wanted to see the kits. One was wearing a white pinny but I could tell he had underneath the 2014 Spurs black away kit, an absolute belter of a kit which I do not have (but my son had when he was six, he wore it the first time he visited White Hart Lane). Much respect. Another guy wore the 2020 Ghana away kit, the yellow one, much respect to that because I have the white home kit from the same year. There were a couple of old Chelsea kits I think, a USA away from about five years ago, a cool black Mexico kit, a black and grey Warrior-era Liverpool shirt, at least one Italy training shirt, and one other football shirt that I did not recognize, which is always quite exciting to me, I think it was a Celta Vigo away kit but I could not be certain. Finally there was a guy in a kit I recognized immediately, the 2002 blue Arsenal away kit, the one with the funny geometric pattern on the front, with that dreaded name ‘Pires’ on the back. Dreaded because as a Spurs fan, Pires was bloody devastating for Arsenal and one of the reasons they were so annoyingly good back then. He had that little stripe beard under his lip didn’t he, which I actually also had in around 1999, because ‘the 90s’. It brought back some memories, seeing that name on a shirt. Anyway, it was fun watching some Sunday muddy kickaround footy.

lionesses before dawn

September 17, 2023Leave a comment

We all got up at 3am, for the second time in a week, to watch England playing in the final stages of the Women’s World Cup. The midweek semi-final was a fantastic win. The final, in those wee hours of a Sunday morning, as sketched here, did not go quite as well. Spain were the better team on the day, and deserved to win 1-0. Of course we all know what happened next with that awful Spanish FA president, it’s been quite a drama. The Women’s World Cup overall was a really fun tournament, even though we could not watch too many games live (as they were in Australian and New Zealand), we watched all the highlights each day. The USA were not so good this time, but I was pretty happy with how England did overall. European Champions last year, beaten World Cup finalists this year (I guess we start counting ‘years of hurt’ again now?). Congratulations to Spain though. This was nearly a month ago now, and these days we are back in the Premier League fun times, and Spurs are doing great so far under Big Ange Postecoglou. However now I am getting right into the Rugby World Cup, of all things. I’ve never been much of a rugby fan, I used to watch it sometimes on telly when I was a kid, but never really understood it like I do with football. I still don’t, but it has been fun watching these huge guys smash into each other this past week. Sport, eh. It’s the big distraction from all the other shitty things in the world, and there are increasingly shitty things in the world, that my mental health just can’t deal with, so I go back to watching sport. I was up at 5am this morning watching the Formula 1, and what a race (Carlos Sainz won; Max Verstappen for once did not win, coming fifth). Earlier this summer we watched pretty much all the Tour de France (well, all the highlights each day, I’m not actually watching them race live). At this rate I might even start watching cricket (no, let’s not go that far). But we loved the Women’s World Cup. And I’m now a big fan of goalkeeper Mary “F***-Off!!” Earps.

he’s one of our own

August 12, 2023Leave a comment

Well, Harry’s gone. After many years of memorable moments, Harry Kane, who just turned 30, has moved on from Spurs, where he’s been since he was 11, for a new challenge in Germany at Bayern Munich. I’m sad, but that’s football, and he was one of our greatest. I would write a whole thing here about Kane and all the other Spurs greats I’ve loved over the years, how I feel about this transfer (he gave us everything, all of his 20s, we have to give him this) and about football in general (as I write, Arsenal are winning), but I’m not really in the mood, it’s too soon. I saw Harry’s goodbye video earlier, and I just watched the England Women’s Team beat Colombia, and now I’m going for a run. But Harry Kane, forever one of our own (as was Glenn Hoddle when he went to Monaco), good luck in this next adventure, and we’ll see you again some day. Come on you Spurs.

davis world cup 2023

July 22, 2023July 21, 2023Leave a comment

I got back to the US in time to take part in the organizing committee for the 2023 Davis World Cup. We handled the gear, medals, pins, logos, website, etc. I had done most of my work (which was the design) some time ago, but while I was away the stickers, medals, pins and t-shirts had arrived. The Davis World Cup is a youth soccer tournament that has been going for many years, involving teams from regions across northern California aged from U10 to U19. I started designing the logos in 2019, having coached a team in the 2018 tournament. I do spend a lot of time trying to come up with ideas, trying to make them a bit different (so many tournaments use a pretty bog-standard vector logo these days, some variation of a shield and a ball). I wanted this year’s to be very different to the round retro Top of the Pops style logo I did for 2022 (which was just the 2020 logo re-used since 2020 was cancelled), have an actual player on it (non-gender specific, and I could change the kit – the main design had a Brazil kit), and make it look fun, make it look like an event which is for the kids. I have a new logo already thought up for next year, a different retro style, but I was really pleased with the 2023 logo and it gave me a lot to play with. The design above is the one we sued for the colourful stickers each player received. They also got metal pins; although we did not provide t-shirts this year, they could buy those from the on-site vendors.

I didn’t sketch much at the tournament (I was all sketched out from the London trip), but I did draw a quick one at a game we went to check out at Nugget Field. I didn’t watch many games this time at all in fact, and my own son’s team wasn’t taking part. Still it is always great helping to make this fun tournament happen every year, and I’m glad to have been able to create a look for it that I think was pretty popular. Here are the two main versions used on the t-shirts, one of which has a Mexico style kit:

Learn more about the Davis World cup at: https://www.davisworldcup.org/. We’ll be back in 2024!

sketches from the sidelines, 2022

February 8, 2023Leave a comment

Let’s travel once more back to last summer. Since I stepped down from coaching youth soccer, I had been able to spend more time on the sidelines as a parent, and that means I can sketch more rather than take note. I still take notes, force of habit, but it’s nice to try and capture the games in a way that the photos taken a long-distance on our not-zoomed-in camera phones do not. Did I just use the term ‘camera phone’? Ok grandad. I know you are supposed to just say ‘phone’ instead of ‘camera phone’ now, and nobody has cameras now unless they are a photographer, so we say ‘phone’ to talk about the thing we primarily use for taking photos, and occasionally use to make calls on. One day I might invent the sketchbook-phone. My poor eyes cannot zoom in, but I tried to draw the action as best I could. Here are some sketches form various tournaments our team AYSO United Davis went to. Above, and the next couple below, are sketches from the Stanford Cup, which was held in various locations around Silicon Valley. It was bloody hot, and I stood in what shade I could find. In the end the team did not advance to the final, though it was close, but they played well and didn’t give much away.

The third match was at a big high school football stadium. I only drew half the field, but the other half looks like that so you can imagine it. When playing soccer on these American football fields it is always difficult to know where the lines are, as the soccer field is wider, and will often use less-distinct yellow lines. So you get people taking throw-ins from the wrong place, about a metre or so inside the bounds, and as for the penalty area, there’s a lot going on on these fields. Still with all the extra lines it’s easier to spot an offside (or ‘offsides’ as they say here). We were quite high up and had a good view of proceedings.

These ones, drawn in one of those pencils I got at one of the Urban Sketching Symposiums, were form the Wolves Cup tournament down in one of those places in the East Bay, I forget now. Diablo Valley, Antioch, that’s it. The local Diablo Valley teams had badges like Wolverhampton Wanderers, I think they might be connected. I know Tottenham had an ‘East Bay Spurs’ youth club, though I don’t think they are still connected. Last season we played one team in San Francisco that had a historical connection to Celtic, they knocked us out of the State Cup (1-0 with a last-minute goal, that was gutting). It’s quite common over here, though when a club has a name like Juventus or Ajax I don’t know if they are actually connected or just named after them. I liked meeting the people from all the youth soccer teams over the years, and had some good sideline banter with some of the nicer coaches; though you get a few who are a bit much, most were very friendly. Parents can be a thing, oh yes. We always had a good parent culture on our teams and strived to keep everybody positive, though we played some teams were parents would be sent off the sidelines for their behaviour. Those refs have a tough job; respect the referees. This was a good little tournament though, everyone was nice. My son scored the first goal, in our opening 4-0 win.

The sketch below was against a team who I can’t completely remember, but played in neon yellow, so I did a few sketches. This may have been the team where the opposing players were really quite unfriendly, and the parents were saying pretty unpleasant things too, and our coaches actually stopped the game and took the players off. Fair play to them for that. This might have been a different game though. It’s not always clear what’s being said out on the field, and I was off in the shade sketching. It was not long after my skin operation so I was sticking to myself and avoiding people in general, getting what shade I could. One thing I learned was that if you use a neon highlighter to colour in the neon shirts, that won’t really come out in the scan, so I had to add the neon yellow scribble back in with Photoshop afterwards.

This final one was done digitally on my iPad, so no scanning issues there. It was from a Halloween themed tournament in which our team dressed up as Minions, and ended up winning the whole thing, their first medal as a team. They won the final on penalties, with my son’s best friend scoring the winning spot-kick. The game sketched below was a group game against the team they ended up beating in the final, and they lost this one 2-1 in a tight contest. I like drawing these on the iPad because I can use layers and get the background drawn quickly, adding in players over the top. Still had to be quick.