November 8, 2015
If you were one of the 19,026 fans in attendance for Crew SC’s 3-1 extra time victory over the Montreal Impact, you were at the second-greatest Crew SC home match in the club’s history. (The 2008 Eastern Conference Final comeback victory over Chicago still holds the top spot.)
On this November night, Crew SC was 13 minutes from playoff elimination. Montreal forward Didier Drogba earned the repeated wrath of the fans due to his leg lock on Steve Clark in the first game and his constant state of injured complaint in the second game…until the ball came near him, in which case he was as strong and skillful as ever…until a defender came near him, in which case he was brittle and hobbled again.
Further, the goal that Montreal scored to take a 3-2 lead was an offside goal by former Crew SC midfielder Dilly Duka. And then Kei Kamara didn’t convert the series-tying penalty kick that brought back echoes of Tony Sanneh’s Halloween horror show in the 2004 playoff loss to New England.
It was a grim spectacle. But then Ethan Finlay was rewarded for a back post run, which allowed him to score the rebound goal that saved the season with 13 minutes to go. And then in extra time, Kamara redeemed himself by scoring on a towering header that would prove to be the series winner. (An ESPN Sports Science segment concluded that the timing of Kamara’s header was so perfect that in order to put that header on frame, he had less margin for error, in terms of a fraction of a second of timing, than a Major League Baseball batter does for hitting a ball into fair territory. That’s mindboggling.)
After the game, Finlay noted that missing the penalty could have derailed many a player. But not Kamara.
“Kei… a lot of guys are out of the game,” Finlay said. “They are done right there if they miss a penalty in that kind of a moment. He stuck in it and he responded with the game-winner.”
Kamara was asked if it was hard to put the potentially calamitous missed penalty out of his mind as the game continued on.
“Now it is,” he said, “but it’s tough because usually when that happens, for every striker, you think about it for a little bit but they tell you to have a really short memory. Sometimes you miss goals, you miss stuff. I hit the crossbar - that could’ve went in. But it was planned for the game to go to overtime and it wasn’t as fun if we don’t push it to overtime and the crowd getting their money worth so that was good.”
Not good. Great. One of the absolute greatest home games in Crew SC history.
BONUS MOMENT: CREW SC FOUNDATION FOOTGOLF CLASSIC
July 26, 2015
The inaugural Crew SC Foundation FootGolf Classic presented by OhioHealth was so much fun that I wrote an entire Notebook about it. If you wish to reminisce, or learn about all the fun you missed, you can read my recap HERE.
