Go! ‘Necks! Go!

Fresh off of a win against the 0-3 Edmonton Rush, the Roughnecks had their first game against then undefeated Arizona Sting last weekend. This was the first time our Roughnecks would face the team that took the Western Division last year, robbing us of a repeat at the Champions Cup.

Going up against an undefeated team is always an uphill battle, even if it’s early in the season. Considering the Sting’s offensive power and our seemingly constant problems with containing Dan Dawson last year I had high hopes for our boys in red.

The game started off with a bang as Tracey Kelusky scored the first goal of the game at 2:55 in the first quarter. Shortly after Arizona came back with 3 unanswered goals we were the ones playing catch up. For the rest of the half the scoring was pretty even, resulting in a 6-6 tie at half-time.

Jason Wulder tipped the scales in our favor by scoring the lone goal in the third quarter. I’m sure that if I was watching the game – I definitely need to upgrade my cable – the fourth quarter is where I would have been sweating bullets. It pretty much echoed the first quarter in scoring with Kaleb Toth scoring at 2:19 and the Sting answering back with 3 to take the lead. Kelusky and Wulder were the next two goals to put us up by one.

Just as he had done 3 times previously this game, Craig Conn tied it up at 10 with 4:57 remaining in the game. With neither team able to capitalize in those last minutes we went to sudden death overtime. This is where, after one and a half minutes of play, Conn marked his fifth goal of the game.

This unfortunate ending leaves us with Arizona remaining undefeated and the Roughnecks in second place, a full game behind. The upside to the season so far being that Arizona is still having a tough time winning games outright. What I mean by that is out of the three games they’ve played so far, two have gone into overtime. The Sting’s next games are against the Colorado Mommoth (2-3) and Rochester Knighthawks (4-1).