Girls stun Westfield

            The Cranford High School Girls soccer team came into their semi final match on Sunday night October 25 with top seeded and undefeated Westfield looking for respect, vindication and a spot in the county finals. The Cougars got all three in spine tingling fashion, battling the Blue Devils through 100 scoreless minutes before prevailing in penalty kicks 4-3 at Johnson High School in Clark. The victory, which officially goes into the record books as a tie, ended the Cougars winning streak at 11 but propels them into their first county final since 2002, where they meet second seed and four time defending champion Scotch Plains on Saturday October 31 also at Johnson.

            The victory was sweet revenge for the Cougars, who had fallen to the Blue Devils 6-0 in the third game of the season. Since that loss, they had been on a mission to prove that game was a fluke and had not lost since. Westfield was third ranked in the state and sported a 15-0-1 record coming into the game but the Cougars showed no deference to their heavily favored rivals and played an evenly matched entertaining game. In a game of limited scoring chances, the Cougars nearly won the game in the final seconds of regulation when Taylor D’Antico’s direct kick hit a Westfield player and nearly ricocheted into the goal, falling just wide.

            In the ensuing penalty kick game decider, the Cougars fell behind twice and could have been eliminated on Westfield’s fifth kick but rode the heroics of goalie Lauren Grandal, Sara Dowzycki and D’Antico to a stirring victory. After Westfield made their first penalty kick, D’Antico struck back with perfectly placed low shot in the corner. After Cranford missed their third and fourth shot, Westfield, which had only missed once only needed to make their final shot to escape with a victory but Grandal guessed right and batted away the shot to give the Cougars hope. Dowzycki still had to make a pressure packed shot to keep the game alive which she connected with a shot to the left corner.

“I couldn’t even look at the goalie. I just tried to hit the best shot I could and make sure it was on goal,” said Dowzycki.

            Now in sudden death, Grandal came through a second straight time, blocking away another Westfield shot, which left it up to D’Antico, who was shooting for a second time. She made no mistake, hitting her second shot to almost the same spot as the first. leaving the goalie no chance of making the save and initiating a wild on field celebration of Cranford players who mobbed D’Antico and Grandal. D’Antico, an infielder, on last spring’s state championship Cranford softball team, felt no pressure at having the game on her shoulders.

“You have to have a belief in your shot and just execute it. Penalty shooting is almost all mental. I wanted so much to make those shots because we deserved to go to the finals,” said D’Antico, who led an airtight Cougar defense, which also included sophomore Madison Savulich, senior Emily McCue and senior Kristen Cecchini.

“Madison, Emily and Kristen were awesome back there. They don’t get a lot of recognition because they are not goal scorers but along with Taylor and Lauren really shut down a high powered offense,” said a hoarse coach Jen Michewicz.

            In addition to her back four, Michewicz sometimes brought up to ten players back on defense to blunt the high powered Westfield attack. Among the defenders were forward Natalie Englese, who also connected on the Cougars’ second penalty kick.

“We worked hard in practice to try and defend what they did to us in the first game. They have a multitude of ways to score on you and it was important for us to get as many players into the defense as possible. Of course Lauren made it all happen in the back,” said Michewicz.

            Grandal, who made several spectacular saves in the first 100 minutes of the game, felt vindicated after allowing all six goals in the earlier game. “I just knew we were going to win. Even when it looked we were going to lose in penalty kicks, I was determined to give us a chance to come back,” said Grandal.

“I told her before the game that sometime in the game she was going to have make a game saving save and she came through for us,” added Michewicz.

            D’Antico connected twice in the penalty kick phase, including the game clinching final shot which sent the Cranford team into a wild middle of the field celebration. Long before the final result, the Cougars had already won the small victory of getting the respect of the county soccer community, who can now view the earlier game as just one of those early season flukes that sometimes happen in high school sports.

“We have been waiting a long time to prove ourselves against them. We knew we were a better team than that,” said D’Antico.

“We still have one more hill to climb.”