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by Paul Hendren
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After losing a game in Charleston on April 19 that many thought they should have won the Lynx revenged their early season loss with a 2 -1 shoot out victory over the Battery in front of 1,515 onlookers at Toronto's Varsity Stadium on Friday evening. Toronto improves it's record to 4 -2 and Charleston falls to 3 - 4. At the 18th minute Charleston's Terry St Louis opened the scoring after beating two Toronto defenders and angling a shot past Lynx goalkeeper Pat Onstad. In the second half Tom Kouzmanis , who will be rejoining the Canadian National team for their upcoming qualifying game in Edmonton, tied the game at the 55th minute on a penalty awarded after a Battery defender handled the ball in the penalty area. The Lynx outshot the Battery 18 - 7 and if not for the heroics of Battery goalkeeper Khalil Azmi the game would not have been tied at the end of regulation time. There was no scoring during the 15 minutes of extra time. Elvis Thomas and Ralph Golen scored for the Lynx during the shoot out and Pat Onstad saved four straight shoot out attempts to ensure a victory for the home team. The game itself was somewhat of a lackluster affair and Toronto appeared to miss the creativity of both Dwayne DeRosario and Paul Stalteri, who are now training with the Canadian Under 20 team before they depart for Malaysia later this month. Toronto travels to Rochester on Memorial Day (May 26) to open the Rhino's home schedule at fabulous Frontier Field. Given the introduction of Triple A baseball to Frontier Field both the Rhinos executives and Frontier Field officials will be attempting a significant experiment by filling in the baseball paths with sod rolls under the guidance of Batavia Turf farms. The Rhinos are the only professional soccer team attempting such an experiment and if successful it could revolutionalize multi use stadia for professional soccer. In other action Friday night the Seattle Sounders shut out the New Orleans Riverboat Gamblers in New Orleans 2-0 getting goals from Mike Gailey and Justin Stoddard.
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