BIRMINGHAM — The Birmingham Groves Falcons and Novi Wildcats played to a 1-1 draw on Friday night.
“It was a very tight game,” Groves head coach Paul Thomas said. “I thought we kind of shaded it in terms of territory and chances. The PK that we had I thought was a just reward for the amount of territory and pressure that we had, but 1-1 you can’t argue with it at the end of the day.”
The Falcons scored first via their transition game. Kevin Sazgari’s cross from the right side took a deflection in front and Mori Miller buried the loose ball high and just under the bar with 34:00 remaining in the second half.
Novi tied the game with 21:37 left in the game when Corey Dennehy was fouled in the penalty area and Jaiden Lunga stepped up to slot home the penalty kick.
Lunga was the key attacker for the Wildcats, directing the offense that was short a couple of starters due to early season injuries.
Miller was the big threat for the Falcons and their quick transition game. Groves had the best of the missed chances — including a penalty kick of their own with less than 15 minutes to play that went high.
The game was a back-and-forth affair that was physical and tight. Neither team had many chances as the defense stepped up. The Novi defense, anchored by centerbacks Antoine Kondracki and Masaharu Kimura did well most of the night at cutting off the Groves forwards in the attacking third. At the other end, the Falcon defense led by Matthew Meilinger allowed even less.
“There were moments in the game where we outplayed them. There were moments in the game where they outplayed us, so I think a tie was a fair result,” Novi head coach Todd Pheiffer said. “We feel like we’re better today than we were Wednesday, and that’s our motto is being better today than we were the day before.”
Both coaches were pleased with the efforts and improvement shown by their teams in this early season match up.
For Pheiffer and Novi, it was particularly about the adaptations they had to make in this game.
“We’re trying to get them to start feeling what it’s like to play a high school soccer schedule because we have a lot of new players on our team this year who have never played at this level,” Pheiffer said. “We learned that we’ve got to learn the different styles of play… This was our first game on turf. We haven’t practiced on turf once. Our home field is grass, and that’s what we played on Wednesday. So we also learned that there are different surfaces and you’ve got to account for that.”
For Groves and his new coach, Thomas, it was another chance to become more familiar with each other.
“I’m new to the group so there’s players that I’m still playing in lots of different positions. It’s really not fair to them that I’m doing that during a game, but I’m still trying to figure out the group and what the best group is,” Thomas said. “(We’ve been together) 11 days. I’m a new coach. There’s a lot of new things going on.”
Both teams are now 1-0-1 heading into next week. Novi will open KLAA play next Tuesday when they face Brighton. Groves has another non-conference game on Monday when they travel to Sterling Heights Stevenson.