Fort Lauderdale Strikers Romp over FC Edmonton in NASL Quarterfinal
FC Edmonton made the long trip to southern Florida Saturday evening to play the Ft. Lauderdale Strikers in a quarterfinal NASL playoff game. Astonishingly, the Eddies entered the game with a better record in Fort Lauderdale (3 points) than at home in Edmonton (1 point) against the Strikers.
For the Strikers it was a bit of mixed emotions. The team finished 4th in the standings but some pundits thought they would finish higher, if not win the regular season outright. Still, the team was happy with the home field advantage in this single elimination game.
The atmosphere for the first home playoff match in South Florida in more than a decade was electric. A few thousand fans attended the match in hopes of some playoff magic and the Strikers did not disappoint.
Striker supporters were treated to a match of contrasting styles: Edmonton played with their Dutch inspired 4-3-3 formation while the Strikers played a defensive 4-4-2. In the end it mattered little. The Strikers took the game to FC Edmonton in a matter which lay dormant for the entire season. The Strikers sent FC Edmonton back to Canada for the long winter with a 5 – 0 defeat.
In a span of 17 minutes, Brian Shriver and Abe Thompson each scored two goals to put the match well out of reach. Thompson would add his third goal in the 77th minute to earn his second career hat trick.
“I expected us to be good tonight, but didn’t expect to win that way,” Strikers coach Daryl Shore said. “We just had a good night.”
Edmonton head coach Henry Sinkgraven was baffled by his team’s oddly lackluster performance. “I don’t know,” Sinkgraven said. “Before the game we had our normal pre-game preparation, so I don’t know what caused it.”
Scoreless for nearly the entire first half, Shriver’s goal in the 45th minute seemed to demoralize Edmonton.
“I got the ball on my left foot, my weaker foot, and it rolled right in,” Shriver said. “This is the best we’ve played this year. We created chances and never gave up.”
Thompson put away his first goal on a well-placed crossing pass to the back post, and Thompson’s header made it to 2-0. Shriver’s second goal of the game and fifth of the season against Edmonton came five minutes later.
“We talked about finishing our chances in the second half and we did,” Thompson said. “The goal before halftime was big because they go in demoralized and we go in with confidence. Coming out in the second we picked up right where we left off.”
Thompson’s sixth goal of the season was set up by Scott Gordon, who beat a defender to the ball in the right corner before sending it cleanly to Thompson for the header.
Thompson’s final goal came on an assist from Bryan Arguez.
“Edmonton was a bit deflated after the second goal,” Shore said. “The second half we were good. We were sharp from back to front tonight. We can only go forward from here.”
Because the Minnesota Stars (#6-seed) defeated FC Tampa Bay (#3-seed) in their quarterfinal game, the Strikers advance to the league semifinals and will play the Puerto Rico Islanders (#2-seed). The semifinals are a home-and-home series with the Puerto Rico Islanders hosting on Oct. 8. The Strikers will host the Islanders at Lockhart Stadium in a decisive second leg on Saturday, Oct.15, at 7:30p.m.
By The Numbers
Shots: FTL 18, EDM 7
Saves: FTL 1, EDM 8
Fouls: FTL 9, EDM 7
Offsides: FTL 2, EDM 0
Corners: FTL 6, EDM 1
SOG: FTL 13, EDM 1
Goals:
45′ – FTL: Brian Shriver
46′ – FTL: Abe Thompson (Lance Laing)
54′ – FTL: Brian Shriver (Mike Palacio)
62′ – FTL: Abe Thompson (Scott Gordon)
77′ – FTL: Abe Thompson (Bryan Arguez)
Cautions:
36′ – EDM: Antonio Rago
57′ – FTL: Brian Shriver
58′ – EDM: Paul Hamilton
68′ – EDM: Shaun Saiko
Ejections:
83′ – EDM: Paul Hamilton (Red card)
Lineups:
Fort Lauderdale: Glaeser, Stahl, Gordon, Lancaster, Laing (Granado), Restrepo (Pecka), Arguez, Mayen, Palacio, Shriver (Nunez), Thompson
Edmonton: Baart, Surprenant, Jonke, Hamilton, Rago, Saiko, Kooy, Oppong (Porter), Van Leerdam, Yamada (Semenets), Cox (LeRoy)
Comments are closed.
Magic! Wonderful performance from the Strikers!
On to the semis!
Finally. Shore fielded his most consistent 11 (minus Arrieta due to red card, but Gordon has been good filling in for him) and by God what did we see? The kind of effort we’ve been expecting all season from this team. Mayen, Restrepo, and Arguez were incredible controlling the game in MF and creating chances for everyone. We actually were a bit inconsistent finishing some very good chances in the first half. This game SHOULD, not could, or might have been, but SHOULD, have been more like 8 – 0. The stoppage time 1st half goal by Shriver was HUGE. Instead of another game where we dominated a 1st half and had nothing to show for it, we actually got the lead. After Abe came out in the first minute of the 2nd half to make it 2 – 0, I knew it was over, and they proved me right by absolutely cruising from there on out.
I expect we’ll see Arrieta back in next Saturday (assuming national team duties don’t pull him away again). Other than him, I pray to God that Shore will field the same starting lineup. I’m still not completely sold on Palacio, but Shore seems to love him. We’re still absolutely abyssmal on set pieces without Chacho in the game, so personally I wouldn’t mind seeing him in there instead of Palacio, but for now I digress.
I am stunned by the announced crowd of only 3,400 souls. Don’t get me wrong, those of us in attendance were loud and proud. But we followed the same pattern we’ve had all year – we play our best games in front of the smallest crowds. We need to at least double that for the October 15th game. I sincerely hope the club reaches out to the local media and that they copoerate in getting the word out. It’s not like South Florida sports fans have ANYTHING else to be excited about right now anyway!
I think this team is finally coming together. I think Shore has finally seen the light and put his best team on the field. We have played the Islanders tough all year, and I think we have a very solid chance against them. The boys are going into Puerto Rico as full of confidence as they could possibly be, and I fully expect a good result. Keep it going guys! Go Strikers!!!!
“I am stunned by the announced crowd of only 3,400 souls.”
Strikers Return, you’re obviously a passionate fan (kudos), but why do you (and so many like you) continue to do this?
You choose some arbitrary number based on YOUR perception of how important the game in question is and when the (announced) attendance figure doesn’t hit that arbitrary number, you’re “stunned.” Or you grasp for some supernatural explanation (the weather, a lot of draws, the Hurricanes playing Bethune-Cookman, lack of free pub from the local media), while never EVER adjusting your underlying thinking. You NEVER do this.
You never ONCE say, “You know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is a tougher sell than I think it is. Maybe not everybody thinks as I do. Maybe there’s more to it than just ‘Big Game = Big Crowd.’”
The fact is, this product is a tough sell (and it’s not just in South Florida, and it’s not an NASL vs. USL thing). You don’t just say “Big game!” and the tickets sell themselves. It has a hell of a lot more to do with date, time to sell and the resources that are brought to bear to actually move tickets than it does the perceived importance of the match.
Yet despite example after example, you never ever – not ONCE – address your underlying thought process, which is flawed.
After a season in which your biggest crowds were for (in order of magnitude) the “rebirth” of the Strikers, the first Tampa Bay game and the Memorial Day Weekend match against Montreal, with the rest of the schedule averaging 3,251, you were expecting, what? 5,000? 6,000? Why? What on Earth gave you the idea you’d have a huge crowd?
And now you say you have to have “at least double” that crowd for the next round home game. That would be at least 6800 and would be – by about 6% – your largest crowd of the year. Given they now have two weeks to sell it and a Saturday night date, if they devote resources to it, they should do better than 3,400, but please, get realistic. The playoffs are tough sells in all sports outside the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL (and they’re still tough sells in some markets in those leagues).
You’re WAY ahead of where you were a year or two years ago; the rebranding has obviously helped (though the shelf life wasn’t as long as you may have expected) and Traffic has devoted resources to the product they didn’t devote to Miami FC. You almost couldn’t HELP but improve on Miami FC’s numbers. But you’re not going to get 5,000 for a first-round playoff game right off the bat, with little time and not without a lot of effort.
What YOU think sells tickets is not always what ACTUALLY sells tickets – especially in this sport. And I wish people like you would look at reality and grasp that, instead of just being stunned.
It’s a Kenn appearance, everybody bow appropriately! Kenn, have you been to Lockhart for any games this year? Do you have any contacts inside the Strikers FO? Do you live in South Florida and have any concept of what efforts have or have not been made throughout this season by the team to market the club? You make some decent points, albeit in your usual “Andy Rooney curmudgeon” style that is both irritating and arrogant, but everything you just said up there is based on assumptions, no personal firsthand knowledge of the Strikers, Traffic, or what they’ve been doing here. Your experience tells you this things must be fact as you’ve seen similar scenarios through the years, and there’s some kind of value in that. But to just blindly assume it applies in EVERY case isn’t a whole lot more “realistic” than me being stunned by the fact that more fans did not show up on a perfect day weatherwise, with virtually no other competition for fans’ sports dollars.
The fact that we have had multiple crowds this season that were larger, coupled with the circumstances I just gave, led me to expect better, based on my actual firsthand knowledge of being at every game this season, living in this market and following the team closely and seeing their efforts at marketing, and talking to Strikers personnel on multiple occasions.
Two factors are in play. One – Traffic’s marketing efforts, while improved this year over previous years, were largely up front (preseason), and I think they were ultimately hampered with respect to in season due to the last minute need to step in and rescue the Railhawks. Without needing to spend that money there, I believe they would have done a little better during the season, and leading into the playoffs as far as advertising. Two – on field performance. This ALWAYS matter, in EVERY market to one degree or another. The Strikers had their worst performances of the season at home in front of the largest crowds. And because of that, they wound up having their best performances in front of much smaller ones.
Casual fans like winners, it’s fact. This team has a core of somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 now that will show up rain, shine, win, lose, no matter what. But that’s not what equals big crowds. It’s getting those casual fans to show up in large numbers, and like I said above, at least in this market, and probably many others as well, the two biggest factors contributing to that are marketing and winning.
Let me close with this Kenn. What always seems to get lost in your posts is anything actually related to the games. You wrote what, nine paragraphs above chastising me and “teaching” me all about the treasure trove of wisdom you are able to impart to us fanboys about selling tickets and getting people to show up. I look back at all the posts you make in different places and I see a lot of this. It’s getting to be a bit of a tired schtick chief. How about mixing it up and giving us a little team or player analysis? Is that in your repertoire?