Men v Concordia Chicago

Wow. The men's team pulled off quite a victory on Saturday.

We came out flat against an opponent that had a similar record as we did. Sometimes it is easy to come out flat after a game like last Thursday, when we took one of the top teams in the conference, Edgewood, to double OT before succumbing to a deflection off of one of our defenders that ended up in the net.

We gave up a goal early in the first half simply because we were not playing with much intensity. The men are a little banged up right now. Hollenbeck missed all but ten minutes of the Edgewood match and only played 60 minutes against CUC, several other starters are playing through fairly significant pain - although that is fairly normal for this time of year. The men stayed disciplined, stuck with our system and began to have some success, even though we were unable to put anything in the net. We put 11 shots on goal and with a minute left and CUC in our half, it looked like the match was over. We were finally able to muster one last push up the field and things got a little crazy. CUC managed a high clear to our left side, in their end, the ball was way up in the air and looked like it was going to go out of bounds on that sideline. A play out of bounds at that point, would have probably ended the match. But Timothy Solarek caught up to it and gave the ball kind of a little bicycle kick back over his head in the general direction of the CUC goalmouth.

His brother Andrew gave the ball a little touch to the right post, where Dave Esgar, our left defender was crashing the goal. Dave took the ball at full speed and just managed to cut the ball back behind the goalkeeper without running into the post and before running out of bounds. There were 14 seconds left in the match when we scored the tying goal.

Seven minutes into overtime, Dave put a header in the net off at corner kick from Hollenbeck.

I'm still recovering. . . - C