Lucas Punkari
As time wound down in the second half of extra time in Dryden last Wednesday, it looked as if the Muskie girls’ soccer team and the host Eagles were destined for a penalty shootout in their NorWOSSA semi-final contest.
Instead, Eagles’ striker Amy Doudiet broke the deadlock with just a minute to go to give her team a 2-1 win and bring the Muskies’ season to a grinding halt.
“Our goal is to always be the best team on the last day of the season, and we were playing our best soccer today,” head coach Sarah Faragher noted afterwards.
“I was happy with how the team played but it just didn’t work out for us today,” she sighed.
As the clock ticked down, Doudiet took the ball at midfield and sprinted past the defence before beating Muskie keeper Nicole Horn in a goal that nearly was identical to her game-tying marker in the first half.
“That’s a play that we practise very often,” noted the Grade 11 student.
“The goal up front on those plays is to try and stay even with the defence, and both of those goals that I was able to score on ended up being pretty similar,” she added.
When looking back on how the play developed in front of her eyes, Horn felt she and her teammates on the back end could have done a better job in shutting Doudiet’s last-minute attack.
“It was just a miscommunication between myself and the defence,” the Grade 12 student admitted.
“I was going to run for the ball but I thought that the defence had her, and then when they saw me running, they [the defence] had stopped running and I had stopped running,” Horn noted.
“It was just one of those things where we should have been talking to each other out there more.”
The game-winner spoiled what had been a sterling effort in goal by Horn, who made a number of crucial saves to keep her team in the game.
“I think Nicole had her best day in net and she was very solid back there,” Faragher said.
“Our momentum and our efforts up front really stemmed from our play at the back from Nicole and our defence, and the transferred all the way up the field,” she added.
The Muskies had opened the scoring midway through the first half when Maryam Seid found the back of the net off a free kick.
“I had just got hit by one of their player before that, and she received a yellow card as a result and we got a free kick out of it,” Seid recalled.
“Another player wanted to take it, but I just really felt that the kick was a result of what had happened to me, plus I was really mad so I wanted to kick it.
“I was just aiming for the far corner, and it went right where I wanted it,” she said.
Doudiet tied the score late in the first half, which set the stage for the seesaw battle throughout the second half and extra time before Doudiet gave her team the win.
“It’s been like that this year all around the league as every game could have gone either way,” noted Eagles’ head coach Gabe Botelho.
“Both teams were pretty equal I felt today, and luckily for us we got the winning goal in the last minute,” he added.
The third-ranked Eagles came very close to pulling off another upset over the Kenora Broncos in the final later Wednesday, but the regular-season champs took home their fourth-straight NorWOSSA title with a 1-0 win.
After neither team could score in both regulation and extra time, the two sides went to a penalty shootout, where the Broncos prevailed 6-5 to earn their ticket to OFSAA ‘AA’ championships this week in Tecumseh.
The hero of the contest was Grade 12 midfielder Stephanie Sparkman, who netted the game-winning goal in the shootout just seconds after Dryden’s Rachel Egli had her attempt go off the crossbar.
“All I was thinking when that happened was, ‘Oh my God, Steph, you better make this one,’ and that we also had a chance to finish this and be done with the shootout,” recalled Broncos’ keeper Kaitlin Sparkman, who is Stephanie’s twin sister.
“When I went up there, I just kept my head down and reminded myself that I knew what to do,” Stephanie Sparkman noted.
“It was also nice knowing that the girl before me had missed for them, so it was good to know that it wasn’t all up to me at that point,” she reasoned.
Although the second-ranked Muskies missed out on making the NorWOSSA final, the team itself is hoping to build off its showing come next season after only losing three players to graduation (Jess Caul, Alexis Hampe, and Horn).
“I think having a season like we had this year will help us out a lot,” Seid enthused.
“We will have a lot of Grade 12 girls next year, and a lot of players who will be moving up into Grade 11, as well, so I think that we will have a very strong team come next year,” she said.
