Daviess County survives Apollo 2-0
Oct. 5—Daviess County would have liked to been more efficient and on target, but it did enough to stop Apollo High School 2-0 in the boys 9th District Soccer Tournament.
DC got goals from Jack Quisenberry in the 22nd minute on Tuesday and Ahmed Abdullahi in the 36th minute. Sean Higgs had the corner kick for Quisenberry's header. Davian Clark found Abdullahi for the quick turn and shoot goal.
DC advances to meet Owensboro in the 9th District championship game Thursday at 7 p.m. at Shifley Park.
Apollo played more than 60 minutes a man down after Ra Son was given a red card for an intentional hand ball in the box. DC missed the penalty kick.
Apollo being a man down might have had a negative effect on DC.
"Yes, you win and advance. But I don't think anybody on our sideline can be happy with our performance tonight," DC coach Doug Sandifer said. "You can say what you want, when they went a man down maybe that changed our mentality, our approach to things, but we did not execute the things we wanted to do on a consistent basis.
"The players realize that and it's on them to decide what this team wants to do from here, It's a very disappointing overall performance. Credit to Apollo for playing a man down for 60 something minutes. Because we could not knock in a third goal, they probably won that second half a man down.
"Sometimes you see that as a coach, a team that gets a man up and they put it on cruise control, but even before that point I don't think we were doing the things that we wanted to do effectively. We went dead silent the entire second half, couldn't hear anybody, weren't giving commands to anybody. Thursday we need a different team show up for us to have an opportunity to win that game. That's on the 22 players now, it's a senior heavy team and it should be senior led."
DC had beaten Apollo by a combined score of 10-1 this season, so being focused could've been a problem also for DC.
"I feel like we prepared them to be focused," Sandifer said. "It's also hard when you've beaten a team twice, we try to warn them about that. I just think it was a simple matter of executing a game plan, we did not do it consistently. The opportunities were there, we live to play another day and hopefully that was our bad game in postseason."
The Panthers are 15-4-1.
Apollo ended its season 9-13. Apollo coach Ryan Poirier thought his team had plenty of fight throughout the game.
"At times it was hard to tell we were a man down, we had some chances, they battled, they really did," Poirier said. "It's hard to play a man down for that long. You've got to give away something. For awhile it was give away offense, then it was give away midfield. I was really proud, they were so tired, so exhausted. If we'd had 11 I think we score for sure. They said (Son) did it on purpose, I agree it hit him in the hand, but I didn't agree with the intentional part."
The season was a roller coaster as a whole, Poirier said.
"It was up and down, we started pretty good, we had a lull in the middle," Poirier said. "At the end we started scoring some goals. The season was a roller coaster, but they're great kids, I had a lot of fun coaching them."
