May 26, 2010
The Notre Dame men’s soccer team captured its second straight victory during their two-week Scandinavian journey. The Fighting Irish topped Naestved BK, 3-1, on Tuesday, May 25. The Irish are now 2-1 on the trip.
Bobby Clark’s match report …
Match #3
Naestved BK 1 – Notre Dame 3
Another Irish raid into Viking country saw Notre Dame beat Danish 1st Division side by 3 goals to 1. The Naestved BK team was a combination of some first and second team players and was played on the pristine Naestved Stadion, which is situated in another beautiful little Danish town situated about 1 hour drive south of Copenhagen.
The only thing that marred a perfect setting was a very strong wind blowing directly down the field. Notre Dame elected to kick into the wind and found it a troublesome element especially when combined with a quality opponent. It was no surprise when the Danes went ahead around the 30 minute mark when a long pass was played over Aaron Maund and Grant Van De Casteele and a speedy home town forward ran on to hammer a low shot past Phil Tuttle in the Irish goal.
The score stayed at 1-0 through halftime but the second period, with the wind now at the back of the Irish, saw a completely different game. Within 10 minutes Jeb Brovsky took a lovely feed from Grant Van DeCasteele and hammered a 25 yard, wind assisted shot into the upper right-hand corner of the goal. The came had definitely tiled towards the Irish and and around the 70th minute Jeb struck again. He started the move with a pass to Michael Rose. Michael met the pass and centered and Jeb had got himself into the box to head home from 6 yards for his, and the team’s, second goal.
Steven Perry iced the game with 10 minutes remaining after Adam Mena headed down a cross for Steven to scramble come from 6 yards. Certainly another good result but possibly the best news came in the shape of Dillon Powers coming on for the final 10 minutes. Dillon had been out of action for the last month after a series of injections for his inflamed tendons and hopefully is now on the road to recovery.
Tomorrow sees us playing our first match on Swedish soil. Halmstads BK is our opponent this time and is the present home of recent ND graduates, Michael Thomas and Ryan Miller. We will play their 19s team and we will put out mainly our freshman/ sophomore group but we understand that it will be another stern test for the Irish.