Despite the fact that it was only a preseason affair, the emotions don’t change — competition is competition.
This held true Saturday when the Boston University men’s soccer team and the Northeastern University Huskies cleared the benches for an all-out brawl in a spring-season contest.
Playing in a game that had the feel of a hockey matchup against Boston College more than a meaningless scrimmage, the Terriers ended the game in a 2-2 standstill with the Huskies. BU appeared to have the game in the bag with a 2-0 lead at the half, but a momentum shift was in the works.
The Huskies and Terriers had been trading shots the entire game, mostly went unnoticed by officials until BU’s Neil Hlavaty was given a yellow card for a slide tackle, and it escalated from there when BU’s Steven Gahl got into a shoving match with some Northeastern players.
“We were not that good at keeping our emotions down today,” said BU coach Neil Roberts. “Emotionally, we could have been a lot better.”
Tension between the teams continued to build up until Hlavaty made a slide tackle that the Northeastern squad took exception to. Both benches cleared as a mass of red-and-white uniforms converged at center-field in a fight that lasted a few minutes until referees were finally able to break it up — but not before BU freshman Tom Strackhouse managed to toss a few Huskies to the ground.
After the altercation, the referees began to call a much tighter game, penalizing some of the slightest of collisions. Northeastern forward Ahmed Talaat took advantage of this, faking a dive that resulted in a red card for BU.
“The red card played a big part on our losing momentum,” Roberts said. “Even being up 2-0, we did a lot of things we wouldn’t normally do.”
Northeastern’s Matthew Laning was brought in to take a penalty kick against BU netminder Joe Cullaro, who was brilliant through the first half of the game. Laning’s kick barely slipped past the hands of the diving Cullaro to trim the Terrier lead to one.
Still reeling from the first goal, Cullaro appeared not to have seen a shot from far outside of the goalie crease, which resulted in the tying goal for Northeastern.
Despite the outcome, there were moments in the first half that gave a glimpse into what type of promise the Terriers have. Freshman forward Shaun Taylor was impressive on offense, netting both Terrier goals.
“Shaun did well,” Roberts said. “Shaun is going to have to be one of our frontrunners in order to win, something he is very capable of doing.”
For Taylor’s first goal, he darted through two Northeastern defenders, took a scorching shot, chased the rebound off a diving Joe Monthey and tapped the ball to the back of the net.
Taylor later scorched a liner into the net on a penalty kick, expanding BU’s leads to 2-0.