Last Goal Is Wright On Time
Count it. The referee did.
Tie score. Clock winding down to nothing. A crowd of 10,342 Wednesday night at the San Diego Sports Arena is going bananas as the Sockers are desperately trying to break a tie with the Wichita Wings.
Five, four . . .
Forward Wes Wade takes a swipe at the ball at the top of the penalty box with his right foot. It bounces a few feet to his right.
Three, two, one . . .
Midfielder Paul Wright steps up and boots a shot past goalie Ron Fearon. The Wichita players shake their heads and wave their hands. “No goal,” they shout.
The referee holds his hands skyward. Goal. Sockers 4, Wichita 3.
What did Wright think?
“I saw the referee,” he said. “The referee had his hands up. That’s all I needed to know. I knew I had the perfect opportunity if I could just beat the buzzer.”
Even Wade wasn’t altogether certain.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was laying on the ground. It was real close.”
Close enough to make Socker Coach Ron Newman wonder if his team isn’t trying to give him health problems.
“I told them I’m getting older,” said Newman, whose Sockers are now 21-24, tied for second in the Western Division with St. Louis. “I don’t know if they’re doing that on purpose.”
Whatever, the Sockers have now won their past six games at home. Of course, they have lost their past four on the road.
The thing is, Wichita had defeated the Sockers in seven consecutive meetings entering Wednesday’s game. So this was a nice change, though the Sockers nearly fell apart after taking a 3-1 lead in the second half.
Wichita (23-23) did everything it could to preserve its streak. Down by two late in the third quarter, Wing midfielder Dale Ervine caught the Sockers napping on their own powerplay and scored to make it 3-2.
Then, early in the fourth quarter, Ervine hit a crossing pass to midfielder Mike Fox, who knocked it off the boards and headed it in to tie the score. Newman called Wichita’s three goals the worst in team history. Slight exaggeration? Maybe. But they weren’t pretty.
“It would have been a terrible loss if we’d lost that game,” Newman said. “We had a battle in what should have been an easy game.”
Wing midfielder David Byrne always seems to be in the right place to hand the Sockers a little misery. It was Byrne, remember, who served as the sixth attacker for Baltimore late in last season’s championship game and deflected a George Fernandez shot that would have made the Sockers’ victory a whole lot easier. Because Byrne was out of the penalty box, the ref should have called a hand ball, but, legal or not, his ingenuity was to be commended.
Byrne put the Wings ahead, slipping behind the defense to take a pass from midfielder Perry Van Der Beck, dribble left and send one into the right corner to make it 1-0. The play was set up by an off-target pass by Socker midfielder Jacques Ladouceur, who knocked it right to Van Der Beck. Byrne has scored 11 points this season against the Sockers in two as a Wing and two with the Blast.
Toward the end of the first quarter, the Sockers bounced back, forward Damir Haramina scoring his fourth goal of the season after his flashy footwork left midfielder Tom Soehn looking as if he was counting sheep.
Things began to roll for the Sockers in the third quarter, when defender Ralph Black scored with help from a Gregg Willin deflection. Two minutes later, Wright followed Cacho’s shot off the boards to poke it into the left corner. That made it 3-1, and the Sockers looked as if they would breeze along the rest of the way.
Socker Notes
Midfielder Waad Hirmez, who exited Saturday’s 6-2 loss at Tacoma in the first quarter after taking an elbow to the head from Preki, was back in the lineup Wednesday. He still isn’t thrilled that Preki was assessed only a yellow card for his action. “It should have been a red card,” Hirmez said. “If anybody else had done it to Preki, or Tatu or (Jan) Goossens, it would have been.” . . . Three teams in the MISL have clinched playoff spots: Baltimore (28-18), Kansas City (27-19) and Dallas (27-18). ... Defender George Fernandez upped his consecutive games-played streak to 125, longest currently in the MISL. . . . The Sockers are on the road for their next three games, playing Friday in Cleveland, Saturday in Baltimore and next Thursday in Tacoma. The Sockers’ road record is 5-17.
