Strikers Sink Miners With Late Goals
Chay Hews: Broke the game open for the Strikers with fourteen to go.
A late scoring surge by the Brisbane Strikers enabled them to come away from the Magpies club with a 3-0 win over the Whitsunday Miners on Sunday to retain their 100 percent record over the Mackay-based club.
Two goals from the Hyundai QSL’s leading scorer, Matt Thurtell, did the damage against a plucky Miners side, who were without the services of skipper Brett Neeve, midfielder Daniel Scotton and goalkeeper Brad Moss but still did enough to make sure the Strikers had to put in ninety minutes of honest toil on a sun-baked and rather windswept pitch to get the result that, in purely mathematical terms, kept them in the race for the championship.
The Strikers, too, had to make a couple of changes to their starting eleven. Matija Simic’s ankle injury, sustained early in last week’s win over the North Queensland Razorbacks, had the Strikers’ coaching and medical staff sufficiently concerned to put him on the bench this week and revert to a four-man back line of Myles Carseldine, Ben Griffin, Jason Shade and Brad McDonald, while Michael Angus returned to the midfield in place of Jordan Farina.
The Strikers quickly settled into their passing game and had by far the lions’ share of possession in the first half, but on a narrow pitch on which the Miners set out to defend with a compact shape the visitors found it difficult to penetrate in wide areas and the half assumed a pattern in which the Strikers’ attacks were funnelled through the centre of the park and their shots on goal, although plentiful in number, were mainly from distance and ineffective.
It might have been different when, three minutes into the game, Thurtell found himself with a good shooting opportunity after lead-up work from skipper Chay Hews and midfielder Matt Christensen had caught the Miners’ defence napping. But Thurtell’s shot was blazed wide as Miners goalkeeper Brett Guttridge raced off his line and the chance for an early lead evaporated.
Guttridge made a good two-handed save diving away to his left ten minutes later to keep out a twenty-metre curler from Sean Burke, but most of the opening twenty minutes saw defenders holding sway as passing movements through the midfield for both sides broke down. Certainly, the visiting team’s central defenders, Shade and Griffin, were well on top of Ben Schaper for the Miners, who was given the joyless task of taking them on as his team’s lone front man as the Miners attempted to use the neat footwork and passing of midfielder Corey Hooper and rare attacking forays by wide midfielders Braden Burgess and Matthew Zappone to keep Schaper supplied.
Midway through the half Burke caused a few hearts to flutter in the Miners’ defence when he raced on to a pass from Angus after the Miners had turned over possession to the midfielder, but although Burke’s drive fizzed past Guttridge he found the wrong side of the netting behind Guttridge’s left upright and the scoreline stayed at 0-0.
Guttridge was seeing rather more of the ball coming in his direction than he would have liked, and he was drawn into the action two minutes later to throw himself wide to his right to keep out a stinging low drive by Thurtell. Angus then shot the best chance of the half wide of a gaping goal after Griffin and McDonald had combined down the left touchline to open up the Miners’ defence, and McDonald’s square pass had set Angus up in front of goal.
So it was a frustrated Brisbane Strikers team that headed to their dressing room at half time, having had ten shots on goal to their opponents’ two without truly being able to claim that they had found the quality of final pass or finish to truly trouble them.
Strikers coach David Large withdrew Burke from the contest at half time as a precautionary measure after Burke had complained of soreness behind a knee, replacing him with Dylan Goodman, who was to play a prominent part late in the second half.
The Miners restarted in promising fashion, with Hooper’s pass on the counter-attack setting up Schaper for a shot from twenty metres that he should have done better with than to allow Strikers goalkeeper Seb Usai the luxury of watching the ball pass a few feet wide of his goal.
In the fifty-seventh minute, though, the big Miners centre-forward did much better when he outjumped the Strikers’ defence to get a powerful header to a free kick from Braden Burgess. Only a fine save from Usai, who leapt upwards and slightly behind himself to get the fingertips of one outstretched hand to the ball, kept it from sneaking under his crossbar.
This was a loud warning to the Strikers of how quickly a match they had dominated could yet turn against them while they struggled to turn weight of possession into a goal. Indeed, for twenty-five more minutes the Miners’ resolute and compact defending denied the Strikers any semblance of a chance close-in to goal. McDonald and Carseldine were still finding it difficult on the narrow pitch to find enough space and time out wide to turn the Miners’ defence around, and anything the Strikers directed through the middle found the Miners swarming all over Goodman and Thurtell who were forced to play with their backs to goal, and seizing on any misdirected lay-offs to turn defence into attack.
The game was going through a spell in which it could easily have slipped from the Strikers’ grasp and midway through the half the visitors found themselves extremely grateful for the cat-like reflexes of Usai, who came up with a truly gobsmacking save to palm away from close range a volley from Hooper, who had arrived just outside the Strikers’ six-yard box in an attempt to turn in a cross from Zappone.
The Strikers survived another jittery moment when Christensen left a backpass to Usai slightly short, allowing Miners substitute Michael Van Moolenbroek to swoop and dribble the ball around Usai. The attentions of the Strikers goalkeeper, however, were enough to force Van Moolenbroek so wide of the goal that he could not direct his attempted finish on target.
The Strikers had ridden their luck at Usai’s end while battering their heads against a brick wall at the other as their attacks ground to a halt around the massed edge of the Miners’ penalty area for fully thirty minutes of the second half. The game hung in the balance but, as if often the case in such circumstances, an experienced player with quality in his feet and a calculator in his head was to provide the game-breaking moment.
On this occasion that player was Strikers skipper Chay Hews. Once more, the visitors attacked in numbers around the edge of the Miners’ penalty area and the home side compressed the spaces as the ball was passed to Hews out in the inside-left channel. Hews controlled the ball and looked up, delaying for a half-second as he spied a diagonal movement by Thurtell and then responding to it by chipping the ball over the top of the Miners’ flat back line and towards Guttridge’s near post. Although Guttridge came off his line Thurtell had timed his run well and was onto the ball in a flash, getting to it before Guttridge and shielding the ball at his chest before swivelling as it dropped to drive it past the ‘keeper and into the far corner of the net to open the scoring.
Deflating as it must have been for the Miners to go behind with fourteen minutes remaining, they responded well and once again they were left cursing the reflexes of Usai five minutes later. As another Strikers advance broke down Miners central defender and skipper Graham Harvey found himself in unfamiliar territory – out wide on the right touchline – with the ball at his feet. He crossed low towards the centre of the Strikers’ penalty area where Schaper and a defender clashed heavily, both going to the ground. Schaper reacted first, snaking out a leg to scoop the ball goalwards, only to watch once more in disbelief as Usai again got something – an arm or a glove – to the ball to deflect it away from close range.
Usai was in the action again to make a two-handed save from Van Moolenbroek a couple of minutes later before the Strikers made sure of the three points with only five minutes remaining. A perfectly-worked wall pass between Carseldine and Angus, out wide on the right side of the Strikers’ formation, sent Carseldine scurrying into the home side’s penalty area and when Braden Burgess’s body check sent Carseldine sprawling to the turf a penalty kick was awarded. Thurtell took the spot kick, sending it high to Guttridge’s right and into the roof of his net as the ‘keeper dived left, to extinguish the Miners’ spirited resistance.
As the Strikers took advantage of the wind dying in the Miners’ sails Guttridge was forced to make a good save to keep out a shot from Goodman, whose pace had come much to unsettle the Miners’ defence, before Goodman struck the frame of the goal when he arrived at the near post in an attempt to turn in a cross from Thurtell.
However, the home side’s reprieve was fleeting, because from the very next attacking movement by the visitors, Hews’s cross from the right was chested down by Goodman inside the Miners’ six yard box in the direction of Angus, who was left with the simple task of turning the ball over the line to make the final score 3-0.
Perhaps the scoreline was rough justice on a home side that had defended with discipline and application, that had had some good scoring opportunities of its own thwarted by Usai’s heroics, and which had been well-served by its central defensive pairing of Harvey and Joel Ikipu, by right back Nelson Burgess’s success in keeping McDonald relatively subdued, and by the deft footwork and probing of Hooper.
But the young Strikers team can probably reflect on the fact that, two months ago, this was precisely the kind of contest in which they could have lost their way and dropped at least a couple of points. Instead, they showed the application, patience and mental toughness to find a way to win. They were perhaps best served on the day by Usai, Shade and Griffin, and by the thankless scrapping of midfielder Jordan Mason, whose tenacity when the going got tough in the second half did much to turn the tide the Strikers’ way and earn a playmaker such as Hews the right to make his mark on the contest.
That new-found ability to roll up their sleeves and graft might well be needed in spades next Saturday at Perry Park as the Strikers try to deny the Sunshine Coast Fire, who also won today, the opportunity to clinch the championship four rounds before the close of the season.
Whitsunday Miners 0 v Brisbane Strikers 3 [Thurtell 72, 85 (pen), Angus 89].
Whitsunday Miners: Brett Guttridge (gk), Nelson Burgess, Braden Burgess, Graham Harvey (c), Kyle McBurney, Corey Hooper, Rick Deboer, Joel Ikipu, Ben Schaper, Matthew Zappone, Eddie Skien. Substitutes: Warwick Jansen (Deboer), Michael Van Moolenbroek (Nelson Burgess), Sam Petterson (Zappone).
Brisbane Strikers: Seb Usai (gk), Myles Carseldine, Ben Griffin, Jason Shade, Brad McDonald, Chay Hews (c), Michael Angus, Jordan Mason, Matt Christensen, Sean Burke, Matt Thurtell. Substitutes: Dylan Goodman (Burke), Rylan Sadler (Mason).
