Abbotsford (Dan Kinvig) – Women’s Soccer: Nice exhibition win for the Cascades on the road, as they defeat NCAA D2 Western Washington 1-0 in Bellingham.
Men’s Soccer: Second-half goals boost T-Birds past Cascades on opening night
The UFV Cascades kept the UBC Thunderbirds at bay for nearly two-thirds of the game, but the reigning Canada West champs broke through offensively in the late going to claim a 2-0 victory on Friday evening.
On the opening night of the Canada West regular season, the Thunderbirds – unanimously voted No. 1 in the CW preseason coaches’ poll – got second-half goals from Victory Shumbusho and Logan Chung to pull away from the host Cascades at MRC Sports Complex. UBC goalkeeper Jason Roberts made six saves for the clean sheet, while his UFV counterpart, true freshman Ethan Duggan, posted five saves in his CW debut.
“I was happy with our performance,” Cascades head coach Tom Lowndes said afterward. “We let them have a lot of the ball – that was part of the plan, and we looked to try and hit them in transition. I thought we caused problems.
“Were there times we had to weather the storm? Yes. But the most pleasing aspect for me was the way we stuck together – our attitude, our work rate, and our desire. I thought we were unlucky – we hit two posts, and we had two or three chances in the six-yard box we could have put away. I’m just happy with the overall performance tonight.”
The two teams started tentatively, with the Cascades mounting a couple of promising counterattacks, most notably a run from Trevor Zanatta down the right side, but his shot went wide.
The T-Birds gained traction as the half wore on, earning a series of set pieces deep in Cascades territory, but Duggan stood tall to keep them at bay. On Jordan Haynes’s corner, Duggan courageously leaped into traffic to punch the ball away just before UBC’s Jackson Farmer could get on the end of it.
At the half, UBC owned a 6-0 edge in corners and a 12-2 edge in shots, but Duggan and the Cascades were level on the scoreboard.
The T-Birds broke through in the 59th minute. Off a throw-in, Duggan came out to claim the ball, but it deflected off his fingertips and into the path of Shumbusho deep in the box, and he bicycle-kicked it into the empty net.
The Cascades surged at that point – Manpal Brar’s shot from the top of the box forced Roberts into a tough diving save, and moments later, Mikael Mainella hit the far post to Roberts’s right.
Chung made it 2-0 in the 81st. Mackenzie Cole threaded a pass across the box to Chung on the right, and he worked his way past a Cascades defender and fired a shot inside the far post.
The Cascades continued to push, and Brar hammered a shot off the woodwork in the dying minutes.
UBC’s Kerman Pannu was ejected in the 89th, shown a straight red card for pushing Atle Koellmel to the ground.
“We know coming out here, Tom organizes his team really well and gets them ready to go,” UBC head coach Mike Mosher said afterward. “It’s never an easy game.
“There’s a lot of energy in Game 1 (of the season), and sometimes the game takes a little while to settle down. But as the first half went on, we did start to take over and grind them down a little bit, and that was the message going into the second half. We got a series of free kicks, and you sensed it was really coming at that point.”
The Cascades (0-1-0) are back in action on Sunday at the UVic Vikes (2 p.m., CanadaWest.tv).
Lowndes said he was “really happy” with how Duggan performed in his debut.
“It’s a daunting task to come in as a first-year keeper, let alone play your first game against one of the best teams in the country, and I thought he did well,” he said. “He’s super-critical of himself, so he’ll probably think he could have done better on the first goal. But it’s a learning process, and if he’s getting those experiences now, then I think he’ll be in a really good position over the next three to five years.”
