Should have seen it coming

This past Monday night was my first time playing for the Monday night Sophie's team. I won't get into the specifics of the team's dynamics just yet. It's very early on and I just want to see how things play out. But I have to say, I feel pretty good about this season. We won our match, 3-2, at home against a team from Sixth Ward. I played second, after AJ had won his match decisively against a SL4. We all decided that I should play, just to get my name officially onto the roster. I was not pleased when they countered by putting up their captain, also a SL5, who I would venture to say was by far the best player on their team. In a race to four games, he got up to a quick 2-0 lead. In the third, he got an early 8. I won the 4th game to tie it up 2-2. He won the 5th, I came back to win the 6th, tying it yet again and taking it to the rubber match. Long story short, the above diagram was my last shot of the match, an unfortunate scratch on the 8 ball. I had marked the pocket in the bottom left corner and was sizing up the angle for this difficult reverse cross-corner bank. I kept eyeing the other corner pocket, worrying about where the cue ball would end up. I put bottom right english on it, and just hoped for the best. Unfortunately, not only did the 8 ball not even come close to going in, but the cue ball caromed off the 5 ball straight into the corner pocket. I most certainly should have hit the ball softer. Doing so would have likely increased the rebound angle of the cue ball coming off the rail and probably have sent it straight into the 5. The same with the 8, it probably would have come off the rail with a much less severe angle and gone more toward the corner pocket. It was frustrating, of course, but I don't feel that I played poorly overall. I made what I thought were some pretty good shots, one killer kick shot and another kick-to-safety that ended up sinking two of my stripes. In each of the two games that I did win outright, I ran out the table on three-ball runs, one of which required precision stop shots with that lumbering, massively oversized cue ball. All told, I felt it was pretty good pool: seven games where the lead went back and forth throughout an efficient 20-inning match.