Lucas Punkari
The Muskie boys’ soccer team will miss out on the playoffs at the OFSAA ‘AA’ championships in Stratford after suffering a 5-0 loss to the Holy Trinity Tigers of Bradford this morning.
Although the setback dropped the black-and-gold’s record to 0-3 and put them at bottom of the standings in Pool ‘C’, head coach Shane Beckett was proud of his team’s efforts, especially with how they played when the game was out of reach.
“We were down 5-0 with about 15 minutes to go,” he noted. “And while lesser teams would have packed up and gone home, our guys battled through and never quit out there.
“Our Grade 12 leaders pushed and pushed to get something out of it,” Beckett stressed. “And if you were someone who just shown up for the end of the match, you would have thought that it was a nil-nil game instead of what it actually was.
“I told the guys after the game that this was a signature statement about the program, and I was so proud of them for not quitting out there,” he added.
After opening play with a 1-0 loss to the St. Martin Mustangs (Mississauga) yesterday morning, the Muskies fell 4-0 to the Denis O’Connor Chargers (Ajax) in their second round-robin game in the afternoon.
“It always seems like the losing coach will say, ‘The game was closer than the score indicated,’ but it actually was in this game,” Beckett noted.
“It was 1-0 after the half and we had a couple of opportunities to score,” he recalled.
“But in the second half, they scored on a play that we would have cleared out of harm’s way nine times out of 10, and it was tough for the boys to rebound from that emotionally.”
The Muskies looked to finish off their OFSAA experience on a winning note this afternoon, when they hoped to spoil the playoff bid of the Wellington Heights Wolverines (Mount Forest).
The outcome wasn’t known as of press time.
“We watched them play a little bit yesterday, and they are a team that we should be able to play with as they have a style that is more in our ballpark,” Beckett said of the Wolverines.
“We’re going to give it all that we’ve got and come away with a win here,” he pledged.
The two teams in each of the four pools advance to the quarter-finals later this afternoon.
The semi-finals then will go tomorrow at 9 a.m., with the championship game set for 1:30 p.m.
