Hot Cougars A Pre-Season Test For Strikers

Saturday 6th Mar, 2010

“If there are people in Brisbane who haven’t seen the QSL, or perhaps question its quality because teams come from outside the metropolitan area, then they should have come here tonight for an education”.

Those were the words of Brisbane Strikers coach Stuart McLaren, who has seen a football ground or two across Australia, as he summed up ninety minutes in which his team played out a highly entertaining 3-3 draw against the Capricorn Cougars in a mouth-watering pre-season QSL appetiser at Spencer Park.

The Strikers, who had seldom been in trouble while accounting for several Brisbane Premier League teams on the way to winning the Silver Boot competition last month, found the transition to QSL opposition more than a little problematical as the Rockhampton-based Cougars, who will be their first round opponents when the season kicks off in three weeks’ time, brought them face to face with the reality that defending their QSL title might be a lot more difficult than winning it in the first place.

McLaren experimented by handing starting roles to debutant Jordan Farina and former Far North Queensland Bulls defender Rylan Sadler, and by starting with a front pairing of Farina alongside Matt Thurtell with Gareth Musson playing behind them in the midfield. But Musson was still the player on the spot at the far post to head home a Sean Burke cross to put the Strikers in front in the fourteenth minute, putting an exclamation mark for his team at the end of an opening period in which they had been the dominant force.

Midfielder Michael Angus was unfortunate not to double his team’s lead a few minutes later when his twenty-five yard effort skimmed Cougars goalkeeper Tim English’s crossbar. But the Cougars, having acclimatised to the pace of the game, then began to work their way into the contest. The speed of Tristan Fraser up front and wide players Joe Burke and Justin McMullen on the left and Fergus McIntosh on the right soon began to cause the likes of Myles Carseldine and Brad McDonald and Sadler and his centre-back partner Simic the occasional problem as the Cougars gained a better share of possession.

It was McIntosh, in fact, who drew a foul from Simic near the byline just outside the Strikers’ penalty area in the twenty-third minute that led to the Cougars’ equaliser. The resulting free kick was whipped in towards the Strikers’ six yard box where, doubtless to McLaren’s displeasure, no-one in a yellow shirt tracked the near post run of Cougars forward Jamie Morris who needed no invitation to bury a header high into the roof of Seb Usai’s net as the goalkeeper was left without a prayer.

The Cougars threatened again in the thirty-fifth minute when a well-directed pass up their left touchline by a defender found McMullen outpacing Carseldine to reach the ball inside the Strikers’ penalty area to deliver a low cross that again picked out Morris, but Usai reacted sharply to parry away Morris’s volley from close range.

The Cougars survived their own anxious moment shortly afterwards when Burke strode unchallenged on to a throw-in to run into the Cougars’ penalty area with the ball at his feet. A desperate block by a defender smothered first Burke’s shot, while goalkeeper English had to be on his toes to save Burke’s follow-up effort.

The first half finished with the teams having scored a goal apiece, but with the Cougars probably having created more openings due mostly to the last fifteen or twenty minutes in which they were slightly the more dominant team.

Strikers supporters were treated to the introduction of Chris Di Sipio, coming on at the start of the second half for his first football action since injuring himself against Capalaba in January, to Jason Shade coming on for Thurtell and Sadler respectively.

But it was the Cougars who began the second half in better form. Four minutes in Fraser was allowed time, having received a pass on the edge of the Strikers’ penalty area, to turn and look up to aim a cross towards Anthony Hartnell at the back post. Hartnell probably should have done better than to aim a right-footed volley that lacked conviction straight at Usai, who palmed it away two-handed for a corner kick.

English was then brought into the action in the Cougars’ goal to save a firmly-struck low drive from Sean Burke, who had been sent into the clear by a pass from Musson, and Usai was sent scrambling away to his right as he anxiously watched a shot from the Cougars’ Joe Burke skim past his right post as the game swung from end to end.

Another goal looked likely and it duly arrived in the fifty-ninth minute when Fraser again drove at the heart of the Strikers’ defence with the ball at his feet before slipping a pass to his left to find McMullen on the edge of the Strikers’ eighteen yard box. McMullen controlled the ball as he dropped his shoulder to dribble inside a defender and work the ball on to his right foot for a shot that flashed inside Usai’s right-hand upright to put the Cougars 2-1 in front.

The Strikers responded with some of their best football of the match over the next ten minutes. Chay Hews and Ben Griffin replaced Burke and Carseldine as McLaren rang the changes, and by the sixty-third minute the Strikers were back on level terms. An interchange of passes around the centre circle that featured midfielder Matt Christensen on several occasions ended with Christensen picking out McDonald’s run up the Strikers’ left touchline. McDonald survived a shirt-pull from McMullen before getting in a first-time cross that was perfectly directed to find Musson tearing in towards goal. The tall striker’s bullet-like header was brilliantly saved by English, but the Cougars’ goalkeeper could not prevent Musson from swooping on the rebound to continue his own phenomenal pre-season scoring average of two goals per game.

Only two minutes later the Strikers were in again. Once again a fluid interchange of passes, this time around the right side of the Cougars’ penalty area, unhinged the Cougars’ defence and resulted in Michael Angus racing in toward’s English’s goal. The goalkeeper’s charge off his line forced Angus to poke his shot wide, but Di Sipio arrived untracked at the back post to get to the ball before it crossed the byline and tuck the ball into the net to put the Strikers 3-2 in front.

The Cougars, however, weren’t ready to be swept aside. As the Strikers’ hot spell subsided, the 2010 Cougars showed they are likely to be made of obstinate stuff as they turned the tide. English’s save from Christensen’s attempted chip in the seventy-seventh minute kept his team in the game, while at the other end Fraser, whose appearance and football gives bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Melbourne Victory forward Archie Thompson, continued to cause headaches for those defending in yellow shirts.

A thunderous thirty-five yard free kick by substitute Bryce Ruthven forced an awkward save out of Usai with his wrists, before the Cougars finished off a sustained spell of attacking late in the game with a goal from a deflected shot by Matt Smiley to earn a deserved draw.

Immediately after the game McLaren refuted any suggestion that rustiness after a three-week break had contributed to his team going through patches in which they made uncharacteristic basic errors. He opted instead to credit the Cougars for the quality of their performance.

“I think it was an excellent preview of not only our first round game in the QSL, but also what people can expect from the whole competition”, McLaren said.

“All-in-all, they certainly made things awkward for us and it was a good challenge - and obviously the scoreline reflected that and the balance of the game reflected that. Across the full ninety minutes there were stages of the game – and you get that at any level of football - where it dropped a little, but across the full ninety minutes the tempo was as high as we’ve had in this pre-season. I think the quality of football was certainly better than some of the games that we’ve had so far. And that’s not just a one-off from the Cougars – we are expecting that from them, and the Razorbacks and Miners and anybody else that we come across.”

Brisbane Strikers 3 (Musson 14, 63; Di Sipio 65) v Capricorn Cougars 3 (Morris 23, McMullen 59, Smiley 87).