Thursday was a tough night on the pitch for the St. Albert Impact 1 men in premier soccer. The Impact dropped their game 5-3 to Edmonton Victoria. Edmonton is the division leader while St. Albert is currently at No. 6 in the rankings.
Victoria got on the board first with a goal 20 minutes into the first half followed by another 10 minutes later.
The Impact struggled offensively in the first half and weren’t able to control the ball while keeper Connor MacEachran was kept busy in the Impact end.
“The first half we just couldn’t move the ball correctly,” said head coach Dave MacEachran. “We have a system that we play and it just wasn’t working for us. We were losing the ball a little bit in the midfield and just couldn’t recover, and defensively we were just playing the line a little bit too high and they were just popping the balls over it.”
Impact winger Jeff Steel said they just couldn’t get anything going.
“We had trouble getting the ball out of the back of the field. Our goal is to push it outside and then push forward. We’d get outside and we wouldn’t have anything on the pitch.”
With less than two minutes to go in the first half, Victoria waged an attack on the Impact defence. In the net, MacEachran made three spectacular saves in less than a minute, including a leaping two-hander. But just before the whistle Victoria finally broke through with a close shot raising the score to 3-0.
St. Albert was able to halt Edmonton’s momentum as the second half got underway, finally getting some scoring chances. Unfortunately the first ball to hit the net was in their own, making the score 4-0.
The team recovered and was able to keep moving the ball down the field, where Luke James shot one past the Edmonton goalkeeper and into the corner of the net.
“In the second half we started to work the system better,” head coach MacEachran said. “We moved the ball the way we’re supposed to move it. We kept the ball a lot better, we controlled the ball better and that makes it a lot easier to play so you get opportunities to score.”
Jeff Steel put the next one in the net for St. Albert bringing the score to 5-2.
“The second half was much better,” Steel said. “We played the ball on the ground a lot more and looked for the diagonal balls through the defence instead of over top of them, so that was a big plus.”
Steel said some player shuffles also contributed to a better second half.
“Putting the big guys up front made a big difference. Having Andrew Tardiff up front made a big difference. He had a lot of height up there so any balls in the air, we were actually able to collect.”
Tardiff scored an Impact goal in the final minutes finishing with a 5-3 score.
The Impact will have to play their system to score a win on the pitch next week when they take on another tough opponent.
“We’ve got another tough game on Monday against AC Milan – they’re in second place in the league – so we know what we have to do and it’s just a matter of progressing all the way through,” coach MacEachran said. “Our goal is to stay up and play in premier next year, so the whole idea is just to keep going.”
