The Brooklin Redmen are in a battle for
playoff positioning. It took over two periods for their intensity to
catch up with their need for a win, but once it did they managed to
do enough to pull out an 11-9 victory of the Kodiaks in Cobourg
Sunday.
Brooklin was shaky early on, having
trouble catching the ball to produce any scoring chances in the first
half of the first period. Cobourg took advantage by scoring the
game's first three goals with some nice ball movement and precise
shooting.
The Redmen got one back after 13
minutes then the transition game kicked in to help them even things
up. Ryan McSpadyen and Chris Corbeil scored back to
back breakaway goals on almost identical shots to the top corner less
than a minute apart.
The Kodiaks defence remained solid,
limiting Brooklin's chances while the Cobourg offence found some
holes to put in the next three goals and extend recapture a
three-goal lead, 6-3.
In the blink of an eye, Brooklin took
advantage of a couple of small lapses to bury a back-door quick-stick
goal by Dan Lintner and a Shayne Jackson marker when he
cut through the middle, took a pass and tucked the ball past Rance
Vigneux after a hard fake.
Those goals came right on top of one
another, at 7:37 and 7:56 of the second period, and it looked like
Brooklin was taking control of the game. Cobourg refused to buckle,
though, and when Pete connected on a nifty low to low backhand for a
shorthanded goal at 11:37, it gave the Kodiaks a 7-5 lead they would
take into the third period. Unfortunately for Cobourg, they didn't
maintain their intensity after the intermission.
“The third period they really came
out and our guys just kind of sat on the lead,” said Kodiaks' head
coach Jamie Dubrick. “We were still trying to push, swing
the passes around and get them moving. That's what happened with us
the first two periods, we had some really good chances off that. In
the third period we just stopped doing it. It's one of those things
we've got to keep pounding into these guys' heads that we've got to
play the full 60 minutes.”
In the defensive end, Cobourg lost two
players for an extended period of time as Riley Campbell and
AJ Masson went down for a while with injuries. Still, the
seven defenders they had available kept working hard and Vigneux
played very well to keep the Redmen off the scoreboard for the first
seven minutes of the third.
But Brooklin started to chip away. Ryan
Keenan, Curtis Knight and Shawn Williams pulled
them into an 8-7 lead. Williams' marker was a bit of a strange one. A
Brooklin player was checked into the crease as he shot and Vigneux
landed on him and looked like he was holding the player down for a
second. As the goalie got up, the rebound had bounced out front where
no one was near Williams, who just picked it up and dumped it into
the empty net.
Under Canadian Lacrosse Association
rules, an offensive player who has been knocked into the crease is
allowed a chance to get out of it. A goal scored while he is doing so
counts, as long as he isn't interfering with the goalie. So Williams'
goal was correctly allowed to stand.
Again, though, the Kodiaks responded.
John St. John lasered an overhand from the top of the
formation over Mike Poulin's shoulder for a power play goal to tie
things up.
But two goals 36 seconds apart about a
minute and a half later gave Brooklin a lead that Cobourg just didn't
have the gas to come back from. Then a mistake allowed the Redmen to
put the final nail in Cobourg's coffin.
“We pull our goaltender and we have a
three on two, in which we're supposed to pull the ball out,” said
Dubrick. “There's a dropped pass, they come back and score [an
empty net goal by Corbeil]. It's just those little ones where you
can't make mistakes. It's the small little mistakes that you just
can't do.”
Dubrick was happy with his team's
performance overall, as he has been when his team has faced the
Redmen recently. “We've played them well all season, all last year,
the year before. For whatever reason, we match up well with them,”
Dubrick said. “Our D played awesome. At the end there we were down
to seven D so it's hard with two extras to go out there and battle,
especially against a team that throws the ball around really well. I
thought we played really well.”
For the Redmen, a mixture of youth and
experience allowed them to pull out an important win that moved them
into a tie for second with Oakville at 19 points.
McSpadyen, a rookie who has played a
major role for Brooklin all season, said his teammates really picked
things up when they needed to after a challenging week.
“We played back to games during the
week. I think the guys were tired from that,” McSpadyen said. “We
have a lot of experienced guys on this team that know what it takes
to win and know when the games are going and winning and losing. They
did a good job today on both ends to pull out the win.”
The key, he said, was getting out on
the Kodiaks' forwards in the third period to limit their
opportunities. “Definitely more ball pressure. They've got a lot of
guys that can shoot the ball on that team and I guess we gave them a
little bit too much room in the first two periods but we locked down
in the third. That's something we definitely changed after 7-5.”
Brooklin is back in action Wednesday
night when they play host to the first-place Peterborough Lakers.
Cobourg's next game is Thursday in Brampton.
Brooklin 11, Cobourg 9 (box score)
