Fighting off three weeks of rust, the
Grand Canyon University Men's Club Soccer Team Purple wound up its fall season with a 3-1 victory over Arizona State University Team 2 Saturday night at Colter Field on the GCU campus. The victory was the Lopes' 3
rd win in their last four matches and evened their finishing record at 6-6-2 – helping the Lopes to match their win total of a year ago.
While the Lopes never trailed over the 90 minutes-plus on Saturday, the physical nature of the match kept the outcome in question until the final minutes. The rough-and-tumble match also produced a red and several yellow cards before the final horn. The Lopes were on the attack most of the first half but remained in a scoreless stalemate until the 28
th minute when GCU's
Gunnar Tang set up a short crossing pass in front of the goal that teammate
Noah Larson moved to kick toward the net, but ASU goalkeeper Gregory Remy charged the pass, broke it up but couldn't secure the ball. That allowed Lopes' forward
Luke Peterson to follow up the play with a shot to the back of the net to give the Lopes the lead.
GCU added some controversial insurance right before the half as Lopes' midfielder
Ciao Silvani's free kick 15 yards from the ASU net curled around the Sun Devils' blockers but Remy made a diving save to push it wide of the near post. While the Devils thought the ball went out of bounds, Lopes' freshman
Gavin Ripley pounced on it and kicked it in to give GCU a 2-0 halftime edge.
The Devils' frustration only worsened in the second half as they missed two penalty kicks and didn't get on the scoreboard until the 75
th minute when ASU's Peter Weir Page danced through three GCU defenders to fire a shot into the left side of the net. The Lopes' defense neutralized ASU from there, getting an
Adin Schwenke goal in the final minute of play to ice the victory.
"It was ASU's second team, but a win over ASU is something we will take any day," said
Lopes' Head Coach Tim Mehrhof. "The boys did exactly what we asked of them: play through the midfield and dictate our game."
The Lopes will take the rest of the fall semester off, and then return for their spring scrimmage season in January.
