King’s stuns Archbishop Murphy 1-0

Published 9:22 am Wednesday, October 8, 2008

SHORELINE

Archbishop Murphy needs to play tough games like it did against King’s.

The Wildcats, however, were far from happy with the final results as the Knights scored late in the second half and hung on for a 1-0 victory in a Cascade Conference girls soccer game Oct. 2 at Woolsey Stadium.

“These will be the kind of games that we play when we face top level competition,” said Archbishop Murphy coach Dick Henderson, whose team is still in first place in the league and on track for the playoffs. “We got beat by a team that played better and we had a couple of chances. We just couldn’t finish our side of it.”

Senior forward Brittany Allen had two breakaway scoring opportunities at the 34th and 38th minutes of the second half, but her shots went over the goal and was wide left, respectively.

“I was trying really hard to play physical and keep my level of play up, but sometimes they just don’t go in,” the senior co-captain said. “It was kind of frustrating.”

The two teams played to a scoreless first half, though each squad had some opportunities to score but were thwarted by the opposing goalkeepers. Archbishop Murphy junior goalkeeper Alexa Hughes and King’s junior goalkeeper Carolyn Dapper both have been involved in the Olympic Development Program.

“It was one of those games where it seems like one goal was going to win it for either team,” Henderson said. “I thought maybe we were going to end up going to overtime. It didn’t happen.”

The Knights’ victory was the first-ever over Archbishop Murphy. King’s started its girls soccer program four years ago.

The second half was evenly matched with both teams again having scoring opportunities. King’s finally cashed in when senior midfielder Kendall Thoreson headed the ball over to junior forward Julia Crosby. The ball bounced on the ground before Crosby booted it past Hughes from about 15 yards out on the right side of the goal at the 22-minute mark of the second half.

“We just kind of let the ball bound and kind of then stayed away from it,” Henderson said. “We try to win the balls in the air and not let them bounce, especially on a field like this.”

The Wildcats (6-1 in the league, 7-1-1 overall) didn’t control the ball as well as Henderson would have preferred. The new artificial turf at the stadium was fast.

“We played a lot of balls right up the middle,” Henderson said. “They just skipped and went right on to the keeper. … We made it a little difficult by playing too many balls up the middle.”

King’s (5-1, 7-1) was coming off a 2-1 loss to Granite Falls on Sept. 30. The Knights had an off-game and were missing some players, according to coach Nicole Gabelein.

King’s had to leave school at 12:30 p.m. for the game and ended up waiting around for five hours before the start of the contest.

“We just weren’t in game mode,” Gabelein said. “We came out on the field in warm-ups and you could look at this team and say they didn’t look good. I could tell before the beginning of the game that it was going to be a challenging one.”

The Knights certainly didn’t lack motivation for the Wildcats, though. At the start of the first half, King’s had three solid shots.

“We came out wanting to dominate from the start,” Crosby said.

From about the 15th minute on, Archbishop Murphy regrouped and then dictated much of the action.

“Since we came out so hard at the beginning they kind of started to figure out what we were doing,” Dapper said. “But then we discussed that at halftime and we fixed it, so it was fine.”

Allen could sense that the Knights were fired up to play Archbishop Murphy.

“I think they really brought it and so did we,” Allen said. “But we just needed to raise our level and find feet … we needed to play more on the ground.

“I could feel pretty much the whole game they really wanted to beat us. They had never before.”