M. Soccer tops Textile for 1st time in 5 years

Call them the Road Warriors. Ironically, both Penn men's soccer team's victories this season have come away from the friendly confines of its home venue, River Field. Yesterday, Penn strapped on its armor, hit the road, and headed into battle against cross-town rivals Philadelphia Textile (5-2), who it had not beaten in five years. The Quakers (2-2) survived a slow start, and eventually came out victorious by assaulting the opposition in the second half. Penn was left standing at the end, beating the Rams by a score of 4-2, the score not indicative of how dominating the Quakers really were. "Anytime you can go away and dominate a team like we did, it's the best feeling," Penn assistant coach Brian Kammersgaard said. "That's the way we have been playing all year, but the difference today was that we put the ball in the goal four times." Quaker losses earlier in the season to St. Joe's and Cornell were due for the most part to lack of offensive execution and lack of conversion on scoring opportunities. But that was not the case yesterday. Early in the first half, the Quakers gave Textile the chance to score first, and that the Rams did. Junior Greg Wilson, who had been terrorizing the Quaker defense throughout the first half, broke free and laced a 20-yarder into the upper left section of the goal to put Textile on the board. The speedy forward added an assist later on in the half as well. Textile's second goal came on a seemingly botched call by the referee. Wilson centered the ball to a wide open Leon Creary for Textile's second goal, albeit a controversial score. "The wide open guy [Creary] headed it, but he misfired and it hit off the post and spun back toward the goal," sophomore goalkeeper Andrew Kralik said. "I came across the line, and I slipped because the field was wet, but I stopped the ball about two feet in front of the goal. We cleared the ball and everyone, including [the Rams] continued playing like nothing happened when out of nowhere the ref called a goal." However, the Quakers did not let the questionable goal disrupt their offense. Penn also scored two goals of its own in the first half on a header by senior forward Kossouth Bradford, and a penalty kick by sophomore midfielder Steven Marcinkiewicz. The game tied at halftime, the Quakers knew that they had to play better defense, and be more alert in the second half to avoid another disappointment. Penn did more than play great defense, though. The Quakers shut down the Ram offense and in turn bombarded Textile with a relentless attack. In fact, three minutes into the second period, Bradford put back a rebound off a shot by Marcinkiewicz to push Penn into the lead by one. From there the defense took over, limiting Textile's offense to only seven shots in the second half, 15 overall. Meanwhile, Penn attempted 25 shots, 15 coming in the second period. The Quakers admit that they could have easily put a couple of more scores on the board. "We could have scored five or six goals today," Bradford admitted. "We missed a few easy chances, but we stepped it up in the second half and scored." Sophomore forward Patrick Larco finished off the scoring for the day by scorching one by Textile goalie Jeremy Holmes for Penn's fourth goal. However, the forwards gave a great deal of the credit to the midfielders for their success. "Those guys [senior captain Mike Gomez, junior Brian Brown and Marcinkiewicz] all had exceptional games," Bradford said. "They were dominating and they were getting the ball to us forwards in good scoring positions." The Quakers took control and eventually won the contest by beating the Rams in every aspect of the game. They made adjustments and came out of the war unscathed, the only casualty being Textile. "There are 11 individual battles going on out there," Kammersgaard said. "We won the majority of the battles. If you do that you are going to win the game. It all comes down to the one-on-one situations and we won our share of them." And they won the game.

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