The St. Albert Men's Soccer League final is back to square one after Tuesday's stalemate in the two-game aggregate playoff opener.
Prestige Worldwide tallied twice in dramatic style in the second half to handcuff the Forest Park Rangers 2-2, setting the stage for Sunday’s championship showdown at Riel Park.
Kickoff is 3 p.m. between the top two SAMSL teams.
“It’s going to be a good game,” predicted Dustin Wiebe of Prestige, who stuck a toe on Michael Flynn’s free kick to knot it at two with five minutes to play in the entertaining affair at the Riel facility.
The Rangers shrugged off the result despite letting a two-goal advantage slip away.
“Going into the second leg we’re in pretty good shape,” said Phil Linehan of the Rangers with an air of optimism. “We’re looking at 15, 16 healthy bodies for that game.”
Prestige, ranked first in the league table at 10-0-2 and in the five-team round-robin playoff forfeited its last match against the Rangers two days after finishing 0-2-1 at Tier III provincials in Calgary.
“We’ve had an excellent year,” Wiebe said of Prestige’s 13-3-4 (61 GF/17 GA) record. “We’re a good team that can work with the ball. The ball has to do the movement and our team will move with it.”
The Rangers are 13-2-3 (47 GF/14 GA) overall, with ties of 2-2 and 1-1 and the 3-1 loss to Prestige before the playoffs.
“It’s good to go up against them. They went undefeated in the regular season but we were able to get a couple of ties out of them,” Linehan said. “Giving up two late to settle for the draw is disappointing, but we have confidence going into the second game and have a really good showing in the last 90 (minutes).
The Rangers got off on the right foot with goals by Craig Cameron, a low shot off a through ball in the 11th minute, and Andrew DeVries, the finisher off a free kick in the 32nd minute.
The teams exchanged quality chances in the first half that kept their respective goalkeepers, Darren Sinke of the Rangers and Louis Trump of Prestige, on their toes.
“Getting up early really helped us get our legs underneath us,” said Linehan, a nimble outside midfielder. “They seem to be a team that starts really quick and traditionally we’re a team that starts really slow so we addressed that tonight getting up with the 2-0 lead.”
The Rangers started to unravel after Ted Bryan slotted a shot past Sinke four minutes after the break.
“It gave us a big momentum shift,” said Wiebe, who helped set up Bryan’s marker. “We knew if we got that first goal we were in for a game and they were too.”
Twenty minutes later, red cards were issued to Bryan and Hayden Seivewright of the Rangers over an incident that left a Prestige player sprawled out on the field in pain. Seivewright’s infraction was physical in nature while Bryan was more verbal. Both players will sit out Sunday’s final with suspensions.
Afterward, Prestige continued to press for the equalizer with frantic pressure.
“Our mindset was towards getting that extra goal,” Wiebe said. “It was our composure and our positioning in the field that allowed us to come back.”
With time running out on Prestige, Wiebe was able to direct the ball with his right foot past Sinke on a bing-bang play to even the score.
“Flynn had a perfect ball right up in the middle. I thought he was going to pass it to (Andrew) Di Timoteo but it went over both of our shoulders and I went to it. I thought the keeper was going to get me coming out, so that was pretty scary, and then I just poked it bottom right,” Wiebe said. “I actually thought it was offside there for a second but I guess it wasn’t so it worked out in our favour.”
The goal was Wiebe’s league-high 16th and his 10 goals led all scorers in the regular season.
The central midfielder is back on the competitive pitch after a break from soccer.
“I was kind of a little rusty at the start (of the season) but it seemed when I got that first goal it was on from there. I’ve been a top goal scorer ever since I was a little kid,” said Wiebe, 24, of his first season with Prestige.
Despite bursts of offensive pressure that tested the defensive will of Prestige in the second half, the Rangers were unable to maintain their lead.
“We were a little too comfortable and too complacent. Some of the balls cleared out of the middle that we were putting to the touchline in the first half were going 10, 15 feet up the middle in the second half, which started to cause us problems. They were starting to get a little more possession deep in the middle of the field, whereas in the first half we were doing a really good job clogging it up and keeping balls out of the middle so that was basically the biggest difference,” said Linehan, 35.
The Rangers are a rebranded team with ties to the SV Spurs, last year’s finalists who were originally Arsenal, a longtime SAMSL fixture.
Prestige also changed its name a few years ago from CSKA Blues FC, the 2011 champions.
Sunday’s winner will mark the first SAMSL champion since Green Street Elite won four in a row but a lack of numbers early in the season forced GSE to call it quits.
This is also the first year SAMSL has staged a two-game aggregate final instead of the one-game championship.
“It’s to get the two most competitive teams an extra game at the end. It’s also a little bit of a showcase too. We can finally get on the Riel grass here and get a few people out. With the final being on Sunday, the bar is going to be open at the clubhouse so hopefully we can drive a little bit of business for the club too. Hopefully we’ll get a few more eyes on our league as a viable spot for guys to play,” Linehan said.
CORNER KICKS: Sunday’s third-place playoff between Chester City (7-10, 28 GF/31 GA) and Magnitude FC (5-11-1, 18 GF/32 GA) kicks off at 1 p.m. at Riel Park.
