On a brisk fall night, the Furman Paladins faced the Belmont Bruins in a hotly contested soccer match. As you know, Furman clinched the number 1 spot in the Southern Conference last Saturday vs. Elon. With a 14-2 record over all and a spotless record at home, we were expecting Furman to have an easy ride vs. Belmont.  Besides, this weekend is homecoming, so surely “they” scheduled a lousy team to play: WRONG.

Things started out pretty well. A good crowd assembled on the home side and Furman came out strong in the first half, ending it with a 1-0 lead. Furman’s defense was bulletproof, and their offense was aggressive enough to keep the ball near the Bruins goal nearly the entire half.

The second half was different. The Bruins’ coach must have given the team a royal butt chewing because the team came out aggressively and with brute force after half time.  Furman, on the other hand, was lethargic. They seemed a bit overconfident and lacked the fighting spirit of the first half.  Belmont scored in the last 8 minutes of the match to send both teams into overtime.

The big surprise was the first overtime period.  With less than 32 seconds off the clock, Blemont found an amazing gap in the Paladins’ defense and put a long, forceful shot right into the far corner to win the game.

Overall I must say that the game was well played. It was competitive, and only one card was given. The crowd seemed to be in violation of Southern Conference rules with the way they were bad-mouthing the referee, who made a good number of controversial calls.  Concessions were good and a number of the soccer fans left Stone Stadium to visit the Homecoming festival taking place on the main mall.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.