Howard scored a pair of goals less than five minutes apart in the second half to rally past Catonsville, 2-1, in the Class 3A North Region II semifinals at CCBC Catonsville.
Howard advances to play Centennial in next week’s regional final.
With just under 28 minutes remaining Eben Koffi put the Lions in front with a penalty kick that was initially stopped by Catonsville goalie Stanley Simonsen (four saves), but trickled across the goal line.
“I was definitely confident, like every time I have an opportunity, I have to put myself out for the team and I’m willing to take that opportunity, so once we got the PK I knew I wanted to take it,” Koffi said. “I always place my PKs like right side power and he guessed it right luckily, but I guess it was just a little to hard. I saw it go over [the line].”
After the go-ahead goal, Koffi moved back to defense and helped prevent the Comets from penetrating as much as they did in the first half when they outshot the Lions, 10-4.
Catonsville didn’t get off a shot in the final 4:22 and in addition to clears from Koffi, Howard got clears from Parker Balin, Carter Parise and Ishan Shah down the stretch.
“They earned it man, they played well, they got the two goals. They made the most of their two chances,” Comets coach Brendan Kennedy said. “We knew predominantly throughout the game especially if they had a lead of any kind they were going to park the bus like that and go extremely defensive.”
Catonsville (9-3-1) took the lead when Chris Argueta drew a foul in the penalty box and his cousin, Tony Argueta, drilled the penalty kick to the left of keeper Nic Madachy (seven saves) early in the second half.
Just 10 seconds after Catonsville’s center back Matt Carlson left the game with an ankle injury, Howard’s Zayden Greivis rebounded his own missed shot and deposited the equalizer with 32:18 left in the second half.
“Losing Matt was huge,” Kennedy said.
Koffi took notice of the loss as well.
“It lifted up the team,” Koffi said. “You’ve got to take advantage of little opportunities like those because you never know when you are going to get another one.”
Carlson stayed out for the rest of the game.
“It was a combination of like a kick and a roll on his ankle and it was just too swelled up. He couldn’t put any pressure on it to come back in to make an impact, unfortunately,” Kennedy said.
Catonsville’s go-ahead goal lit a fire in the Lions.
“I’ve never been more proud of them the way they reacted,” Howard coach Nils Schroder said. “We’ve gotten goals scored on us before and we’ve dropped our heads and the way they reacted, I saw Eben go literally start talking to his teammates and put his hand around them and say ‘We got this, we got this,’ and for the next five minutes we got opportunity after opportunity and it was just a great thing to see.”
Howard extended it’s non-losing streak to six and winning streak to four.
“We lost a lot of close ones early and we just had to figure out how we could not give up goals and also stay dangerous,” Schroder said. “We started figuring that out a couple weeks ago and we’ve been on a nice little run since.”
Catonsville was on a roll as well with nine wins and one tie in its last 10 games, including a 2-1 victory over Hereford in the Baltimore County championship game.
“Obviously, you never envision it going one way. We all felt this was a team that could contend, that could go all the way, but we also know that in postseason anything can happen,” Kennedy said. “It’s competitive, everybody is out here giving everything they’ve got and it’s for somebody unfortunately it’s not going to be enough on that day and sadly it’s us today.”
Catonsville had some of golden opportunities to break through in the first half, but a shot by Dom Brown was just wide and another shot by Tony Argueta that cleared the goalie was saved at the goal line by Daniel Ukono.
Two minutes after Ukono’s stop, Howard nearly broke the scoreless tie on a shot by Max Merkey that was saved by a diving Simonsen and the point blank rebound strike on the doorstep by Shah was smothered by Simonsen.
Neither team threatened the rest of the half, setting up the dramatic second half and once the Lions took the lead Koffi felt very confident.
“We know that our team might not be that skilled, but we do work our butts off, so our plan was if we could score a [go-ahead] goal we could sit and no one is going to get through our defense,” he said.
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