A close score led to a lot of contact in a 1-1 draw between Gresham/Bowler and Clintonville in a nonconference high school soccer match Thursday in Clintonville.
Gresham/Bowler freshman Todd Ortradovec gave the Wildcats a 1-0 advantage 4 minutes, 35 seconds into the match, scoring when the ball popped out of a scrum in front of the Clintonville goal.
“He picked up some loose trash and put it in the back of the net,” Gresham/Bowler coach Nate Boucher said. “He’s my outside halfback, that’s what I told him that his job is. Anything that slips through, he takes care of it. He did a good job.”
With about 28 minutes left in the first half, Clintonville (4-2-1, 2-2 Eastern Valley) tied the game when Paul Kenfield, a senior forward who leads the Truckers in scoring, found the net.
“That was just a ball that got to the corner. He was trying to cross it and it went in for us,” Clintonville coach Roger Lupien said. “He’s had a good season.”
The 1-1 tie would stand the final 73 minutes of the increasingly testy match.
“We haven’t gone through that all year,” Lupien said. “We got a bunch of kids hurt, leg injuries. It was a chippy game. Guys in the green shirts didn’t have control very long.
“I think we started to react. We felt we got some shoves early. It just cascaded from there, unfortunately. We didn’t play a lot of soccer this afternoon. We played a lot of kickball, a lot of push. It wasn’t fun to watch.”
In the final minute of the game, the Truckers had one last chance when senior midfielder Blake Hauser got an open shot, but it was wide left.
“We had good shots, we just had poor angles and we whiffed a few,” Lupien said. “We had some really good opportunities in the first half and shanked them off to the side. We’ve played better offensively up until today. They took us out of what we do best. Congrats to them.”
Freshman goal keeper Drew Haffner was solid throughout the match for Gresham/Bowler (3-2-2). He had eight saves, while Clintonville had 18 shots on goal.
“He’s done a tremendous job this year,” Boucher said. “There’s a couple of games that a couple got through, but he’s still a freshman, he’s still learning. He’s been doing a great job for us.”
As for the draw and physicality of the game, Boucher will take it.
“A tie is always better than a loss,” Boucher said. “The boys played hard. They didn’t back down any. It was a very physical game. That’s the way the game ends up being sometimes.”
Junior Bob McCoy had 11 saves in goal for the Truckers.
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