Enjoyed A 22-Game Unbeaten Streak
What a season the Richmond Kickers had in 2013!
They opened the USL PRO season with 22 consecutive games without a loss. No team in the league had ever done that.
It was an exciting run put together by a team comprised of a core of veteran players and a group of “loaners” from Major League Soccer.
They did it for much of the season without the help of their all-time leading scorer, Matt Delicâte, who struggled to regain form after coming into the season with a nagging injury.
That streak, which began on April 6 with a 0-0 draw with the Pittsburgh Riverhounds, came to an end on Aug. 3 with a 5-2 loss to the Charleston Battery in Charleston in front of a crowd of 3,460 at Blackbaud Stadium.
[show_disconnected][show_to accesslevel=’Subscriber’] All streaks eventually come to an end, but the streak didn’t matter as much as a postseason run to the league championship. The Kickers entered the playoffs as the league’s regular season champions.
Or so it seemed.
The end of the season came one win short of the USL PRO championship game, and it came at home when the top-seeded Kickers were stunned by the #5-seeded Charlotte Eagles, 2-1 at City Stadium.
Richmond took a 1-0 first-half lead when midfielder Michael Callahan scored a header off Brian Ownby’s corner kick 11 minutes into the game.
But the Eagles rallied for a pair of goals from Christian Ramirez and Jorge Herrera to take a 2-1 lead into halftime. That is the way the game and the season would end for the Kickers, despite a surge of pressure to get the equalizer in the final 10 minutes of the game.
No one should have been surprised with the way the semifinal playoff game played out. The regular season had produced two dramatic games.
In the first, the Eagles went down two goals, but came back to take a 3-2 lead in the 90th minute of play. The Kickers pulled off an unlikely draw when Conor Shanosky scored deep in stoppage time.
In the second meeting Joseph Ngwenya scored in the 72nd minute for a narrow 1-0 Kickers’ win a month before the third meeting between the two rivals in the playoffs.
But in the end, over a couple hours time span, it was over for another season. The dreams of winning the championship was over. One win more and the Kickers would have hosted the title match. It would not happen.
In time, the players, coaches and officials in the Richmond Kickers professional organization will be able to look back at an incredible season, and an incredible run of 22 games without a loss. But that is some time in the future.
Too soon now, with that last loss still so close at hand.
There were some postseason individual honors. Kickers goalkeeper Andrew Dykstra, defenders Henry Kalungi and William Yomby and midfielder Ngwenya, were named All-League First Team. Dykstra, on loan from D.C. United, was also named the USL PRO Goalkeeper of the Year. Richmond head coach Leigh Cowlishaw was the league’s Coach of the Year.
The Eagles advanced to the USL PRO championship game for the first time, where they were beaten by the Orlando City Lions 7-4 is an offensive showcase before a crowd of over 20,000.
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