By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
STAYTON, Ore.– Both Stayton and Newport turned it on in the final 15 minutes of Thursday’s Oregon West Conference game at Stayton High School.
The first 65 minutes of the game were consistent with drives, set-ups and long shot attempts as the two squad’s backline’s gave their goalies some room to breathe with the consistent barrage that was happening.
But then. In those final 15 minutes, forwards and midfielders began to find creases in each other’s defense’s to set up the pressure on the goalies.
Stayton’s Ty Williams was first up, the senior goalie made two crucial saves around the 12/13 minute mark to keep the Cubs at bay. Stayton responded, driving into Newport territory and made Cub sophomore goalie Kanten Venemon work for the two saves he had in response with 11:15 and 10:40 left in the game respectively.
The defense’s were under pressure. But they came out like diamonds from that pressure because of how rock solid they were to keep this thing knotted up at zero down the stretch in what would become a 0-0 tie.
“To be honest, that was a crazy offense, I can’t believe we kept it like that the whole game. It was great play by our defense, our whole team had a great game in the second half. I couldn’t be more happier with the result,” said Venemon. “I was diving and stuff, I didn’t know what was really going on, it was just a great game. It was a lot of fun to be honest. We’re going to play better after this game. It’s only up from here.”
“Our defense has been great these last couple of games, last year was great and now we’re just looking for ways to score goals. As the season goes on, we’ll find those goals and we’ll improve. I think we’ll fix that. We’ll come back stronger, we should’ve ended that game before that call happened, we should’ve scored more goals before. We’ll build off of that and improve,” said Ruben Bell.
As the game came to a close, and both teams tried to break the shutout to get the three-points out of the game, confusion happened.
Newport’s defense, who just made a defensive stand, kicked the ball out of their box and saw Stayton field it on the Newport 30-yard line with about eight seconds remaining and sent it back in. At the buzzer, Josiah Dessieux shot it and it scored.
Stayton said it counted as they thought Dessieux’s shot was in the air at the final horn, Newport said the shot was late. The refs decided it was a late shot and ended the game with the score 0-0.
Heartbreak for sure for Stayton as the Cubs battled them to the tie, but the Eagles are already looking towards the rematch out in Newport on October 21.
“It’s always a good game with Newport, we had a lot of fun. We got unlucky there at the end with the call, but it is what it is. We’ll come back harder next time, we still have one more game against them, we’ll come back and play them hard.
Photos By Jeremy McDonald
