Dal women send SMU home

By Arfa Ayub, Staff Contributor

It was a rematch of two rival teams last Friday: the Dalhousie Tigers and the Saint Mary’s Huskies. Last time these two teams met each other the Tigers won in a close 2–1 game. This game, the Tigers came out on top again, 1–0.

“Really pleased with the effort, we used a lot of people in today’s game, we kept the intensity high,” said Tigers head coach Jack Hutchison. “Defensively I thought we did a good job of shutting them down. There were a couple of silly mistakes that we made, but hey: everybody makes those. Offensively I would like to see us have a little bit more on attack and things like that but generally right now where we are, I am pretty happy.”

It was a quiet first six minutes at Wickwire field, with neither of the teams really getting any great chances as Dalhousie kept possession of the ball though the middle. The first great chance for Dalhousie came when the Tigers were awarded a free kick but missed low left side, and the score remained 0–0.

Late in the first half, the game started to pick up. With 13 minutes left, Tigers rookie Bianca Jakisa, scored the lone goal of the game after receiving a great pass from Beth O’Reilly down the middle. This was Jakisa’s first goal as a Tiger.

As Dalhousie started to gain momentum, the Huskies were on edge, trying to keep it to a one goal game.

Saint Mary’s lone chance of the half came when a Dalhousie player made a defensive mistake and as the ball bounced over her, Dalhousie goalkeeper Taryn McKenna came out of her net to make herself big.

That plan almost backfired on McKenna as Stephanie Burgess nearly scored on the empty net, but her shot missed.

The second half of the game was the same story as the Tigers kept good possession of the ball.

“We just made a few changes with regards to our formation and put a few different people in  a couple different positions, which I don’t think allowed them as much time on the ball, so they didn’t have time to play,” said Hutchison.

It was windy evening at Wickwire field and Hutchison felt that the Tigers did not use that to their advantage.

“The wind always affects it; you know I thought we played well. That’s probably in the first half is a little bit of a disappointment for me because I thought maybe we could have made better use of that and we didn’t,” said Hutchison.