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Home > Articles > Intercollegiate Sport > Soccer Gaels upset No. 1 Ottawa; advance to women's Final Four tournament
Soccer Gaels upset No. 1 Ottawa; advance to women's Final Four tournament
Posted: October 27th, 2013 @ 9:48pm
Queen's Golden Gaels are bound for the provincial championship tournament after they upset the No. 1-ranked Ottawa Gee-Gees 1-0 in an Ontario University Athletics women's soccer quarter-final game Sunday afternoon in Ottawa.
A goal by Brittany Almeida in the fifth round of a shootout was the decisive score, after neither team managed to score in regulation time or overtime.
"A little too exciting for an old guy but very enjoyable and I'm very proud of the way they played," Queen's coach Dave McDowell said.
In the shootout Gaels goalkeeper Madison Tyrell got a finger on Ottawa's first attempt to tip the ball off the post, and she made clean saves on the Gee-Gees' next two shots.
After Melissa Jung and Alexis McKinty scored on the Gaels' third and fourth kicks, Ottawa goalie Cynthia LeBlanc stepped up to take Ottawa's fifth kick. She sored to tie the shootout 2-2.
Almeida, a sophomore from Regiopolis Notre Dame who scored twice in the regular year, beat LeBlanc with a high shot to the goalkeeper's left to put Queen's through to the Ontario Final Four tournament, starting Friday at London.
"Their goalie is a good goalie," McDowell said of LeBlanc, who made 10 saves in regulation and overtime. "You had to be pretty precise to beat her."
Tyrell denied all eight Ottawa shots before the shootout as the Gaels, remarkably, allowed the Gee-Gees to score just once in three contests this year. In compiling the 12-1-3 record that propelled them to the top of the national ranking, Ottawa scored 54 times in 14 games against the league's other teams.
The reigning national silver medalist, Queen's dropped out of the nation's Top 10 Oct. 8, as amid a spate of injuries they fell into fourth place in the East division. It was a strange season in that even though the Gaels lost just twice, they also won fewer than half of their games, finishing at 7-2-7.
Against Ottawa, however, the Gaels competed well, losing 1-0 early in the season and then battling the Gee-Gees to a scoreless draw.
"I don't think there were many games where I thought we were outplayed or we weren't the team creating the better chances," McDowell said. "The majority of the games we probably did that and just didn't finish.
"Both the Ottawa games - that certainly would have been the way we came out of the game feeling. They're an excellent team but I thought we matched up well against them and they struggled to deal with some of our strengths, particularly our wide players, who I thought were again very good. Riley Filion and Jenn Siu caused them all kinds of trouble."
McDowell characterized Sunday's match as a "tough game in a tough place to play" and he said the game began slowly.
"Both teams looked a little tentative in the first half, a case of nerves, maybe, but I thought we settled down in the last 15 minutes of the half and did some really good things," he said. "We had some chances.
"The second half was a little bit back and forth. I thought maybe we created better chances from the run of play. They did some stuff from set pieces but I thought overall we did a good job defensively in terms of shutting them down and limiting them in what they could do from the run of play."
Queen's will be joined at the conference championship tournament by Carleton, which defeated the seventh-ranked Varsity Blues 1-0 in overtime on the road Sunday as both of the top two teams in the East division fell victim to an upset. As the lower surviving eastern team, Queen's will face Western, 11-0-5 and the No. 2-ranked team in the land, in one of Friday's semifinals.
Western beat Guelph 2-0 Sunday, while Laurier gained the other Final Four berth - and a semifinal date with Carleton - with a 2-0 win over Ontario Tech.
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The Queen's men had their soccer season end Sunday afternoon, when they dropped a 2-1 decision to the Carleton Ravens in Ottawa.
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