CALGARY – The Univeristy of Calgary Dinos men's soccer team will head into the playoffs riding high, after taking out the Prairie Division-leading Mount Royal Cougars 1-0 Saturday afternoon at Dinosaur Field in the final match of the regular season.
After losing the first installment of the Crowchild Classic to the Cougars 5-0 way back on Aug. 24, the Dinos would extract revenge on their crosstown rivals, putting on a defensive show of their own.
"The clean sheet was huge," explained Dinos goalkeeper
Jake Ruschkowski. "We are hoping to keep that up heading into the playoffs, because obviously we have a couple bad performances where we have given up a lot of goals."
After a hard-fought opening 30 minutes, the Dinos would finally break through off a series of corners. After the Cougars successfully defended the first one,
Decklin Mahmi's second consecutive corner would be headed home by
Adam Huskic at the back post, putting the Dinos up 1-0.
Huskic's first of the season would be all the offence the Dinos would need, as their defence was swarming all game. They made life very difficult for the Cougars attackers, giving up zero shots on target throughout the match.
It was an incredibly physical contest, with five yellow cards being handed out by the referee: three to the Cougars and the other two to the Dinos.
Mount Royal, who have locked up first place in the Prairie Division, held out leading scorer Dane Domic with the playoffs right around the corner. Their offence clearly was not the same without him, as their best chance did not come until late in the second half when Tysen Chatani rang one off the left post.
The win was the last game on Dinosaur Field for a trio of Dinos players, as fifth-years
Cristiano De Carvalho,
Mark Bohdan, and
Jared Fillo will move on from the team after this season.
The Dinos and Cougars will await Sunday's results heading into next week's Canada West quarter-finals, with MRU set to host the fourth-place Pacific team, while the Dinos will wait for other results in the conference to determine their opponent and location next week.
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