NEW GLASGOW – The Newbridge Senators ruined the Scotsburn Major Bantam Crushers only home game for the weekend at the John Brother MacDonald Stadium on Thursday afternoon, coming back from an early deficit to win 5-2.
More importantly for the Crushers, because their round-robin games count towards the NSMBHL regular season, they didn’t get two points to move from 12th to 11th in the standings ahead of Truro. Head coach Richard White said his team had the start they wanted, but stopped skating hard as the game continued.
“We stopped moving our feet for most of the game and we got watching more than making things happen,” he said. “We always use the expression ‘don’t hope things happen, make them happen’ and tonight we just watched for most of the game, outside of the first period.”
Opening the scoring for the Scotsburn Crushers was Colin Holmes, 7:18 into the first period, with assists to Jeff Skinner and Ryan Chabassol. The Crushers held their lead through the first frame, only to have the Senators score 44 seconds into the second off Matt Berrigan’s stick to tie the game 1-1.
The next goal came at the 7:22 mark of the period from Connor Peveril, giving the Senators their first lead of the game. Just over two minutes later Peveril scored his second of the game to pad the Senators lead.
“Once they scored that third goal you could see the bench and the emotion in the guys got drained a little bit,” he said. “They were running off a high with it being the first game of the tournament in the first period, but once they got a couple goals against us – we have a little bit of trouble adjusting to adversity and having goals against us and that’s what you get as a result, us standing around.”
Peveril’s second goal was the final goal of the period for Newbridge, who took a 3-1 lead into the break.
In the third, with goals from Noah McMullin and Ryan MacDonald, Newbridge opened up a 5-1 lead. MacKeil MacDonald added the final goal of the game for Scotsburn with 4:51 remaining.
Zac Cadwell picked up the win in goal for the Senators, while Jaxon Maloney took the loss between the pipes.
The Crushers play the Truro Bearcats next on Friday afternoon at 4 p.m. at the Pictou County Wellness Centre. In the NSMBHL they are tied with Truro at 10 points apiece, although Truro holds the tiebreaker with more wins. White said his team is focused on Friday and will forget Thursday’s loss.
“We’ll think about this game for five minutes then turn our focus to Truro tomorrow and that’s what I just finished talking to them about,” said White. “We don’t care about anything else except for the Truro Bearcats at 4 p.m. tomorrow.”
“There’s no balance between a tournament and league play mindset, these are two points and that’s all we care about.”
christopher.cameron@ngnews.ca
On Twitter: @NGNewsChris
