Sockers Win on Road to Get Home Edge for First Playoff Series
The Sockers clinched second place in the Major Indoor Soccer League and gained the home-field advantage in the first round of the playoffs with a 6-2 victory over the Kansas City Comets Saturday night.
Playing without Steve Zungul and Branko Segota--the two leading scorers in MISL history-- the Sockers (26-21) embarrassed the Comets and eliminated them from the playoffs in front of 10,172 at Kemper Arena.
The Sockers, who close the regular season against Tacoma tonight at 6:05 at the Sports Arena, will face the third-place Dallas Sidekicks in the first round of the playoffs. Dates have yet to be announced.
Kansas City, meanwhile, fell to 20-26 with its third straight loss and will miss the playoffs for the first time in three seasons.
Paul Dougherty and Alan Willey scored two goals each for the Sockers and goalkeeper Victor Nogueria made 14 saves, including stopping Barry Wallace’s penalty kick in the third quarter. Nogueria lowered his goals-against average to 2.86, which is on a pace to break teammate Zoltan Toth’s MISL-record 2.97 set last season.
The victory was the 200th MISL win for Socker Coach Ron Newman, who joins Baltimore’s Kenny Cooper and former Cleveland coach Timo Liekoski as the only MISL coaches to reach that plateau.
“The 500 wins (including the NASL and American Soccer League) I got not long ago, which is more important to me,” Newman said.
So is finishing second.
“At the beginning of the year,” he said, “if somebody had said we’d be in second place, I’d have been happy with that, because I thought we were pretty much torn asunder at the beginning of the year, and we were at the bottom of the league. Now, here we are at 26-21, I think we’ve done pretty well.”
Newman said he is hopeful that Segota and Zungul, who have pulled hamstrings, and Chris Chueden (abdominal strain) will be ready for the playoffs.
“With those players, we have a good shot (at a fifth MISL championship),” Newman said. “But the people out there in their place have done well.”
One of those was Dougherty, who took a team-high six shots, and collected three points in the game.
“In the past, we’ve always relied on depth,” Dougherty said. “That’s the one thing this team has. We’ve got over that barrier (of Segota and Zungul’s absences).”
The Sockers took a 2-0 lead in the first quarter. After Dale Mitchell scored for Kansas City 2 minutes into the second quarter, San Diego put the game away with four straight goals before Greg Ion scored a sixth-attacker goal in the fourth quarter.
“When you’re ahead of Kansas City, you got to be in the clear, because so many times we played them and they came back at us and won the game,” Dougherty said. “I don’t think there was any time in the game we felt it was over.
“Finishing second was a big incentive for us. The game was big for us tonight, just the same as it was very big for them.
“We had the playoff spirit with us.”
The Sockers jumped to that 2-0 lead on first quarter goals by Zoran Karic and Dougherty.
After Mitchell’s goal, the Sockers’ Alan Willey took a long chip from Cacho and rammed home a shot from the left side off the far post for a 3-1 lead 10:19 into the second period.
Two minutes later, the Comets had a power-play opportunity when the Sockers were called for their sixth foul. During the power play, Nogueria leaped and caught a high pass only to come down with it outside the penalty area.
But instead of an intentional handball--and another 2-minute penalty--an unintentional handball was called, which is just a foul. The Comets failed to take advantage of the power play and trailed 3-1 at halftime.
The Sockers took a 4-1 lead 6:22 into the third quarter on Paul Wright’s eighth goal of the season. After the Comets had applied pressure in San Diego’s end without success, Wright caught Kansas City on the counter-attack, drew David Brcic out of the goal and bounced the shot past him.
