Coleraine booked their place in the sixth round of the Irish Cup with a comfortable 4-0 win over 10-man Crusaders at the Showgrounds. <\/p>\n
Brendan Hamilton was sent off early in the second half and Mark Connolly opened the scoring from that free-kick. <\/p>\n
Will Patching and James Akintunde scored twice in quick succession and Joel Cooper added a fourth for the Bannsiders. <\/p>\n
The home side started brightly but it was visitors Crusaders who had the best chance in the opening quarter.<\/p>\n
Dylan Boyle’s errant back pass put team-mate Connolly in trouble, Crusaders forward Elliott Dunlop on to the loose ball in a flash.<\/p>\n
He strode forward before unleashing a low shot which recalled Coleraine keeper Ryan Schofield did well to save at his near post.<\/p>\n
At the other end Cooper threatened on a couple of occasions while Patching’s free-kick was comfortably dealt with by Crusaders goalkeeper Musa Dibaga.<\/p>\n
And Patching was denied again moments later as Dibaga leapt to his left to palm the ball away after great play from Matthew Shevlin down the left.<\/p>\n
Coleraine broke the deadlock two minutes after the restart thanks to former Derry City captain Connolly’s first goal for the club following the dismissal of Hamilton.<\/p>\n
The Crusaders defender, booked in the first half for a foul on Zane Okoro, received a second yellow for a similar offence.<\/p>\n
Ben Wylie swung a cross over from the resulting free-kick and there was Connolly at the back post to thunder a header past Dibaga high into the roof of the net from close range.<\/p>\n
The home side doubled their lead just after the hour mark when Patching showed great awareness to curl home a delightful free-kick from the edge of the penalty area, completely deceiving the Crusaders keeper.<\/p>\n
Akintunde rifled home at the second attempt after the visitors defence had failed to clear their lines to make it 3-0 two minutes later before Cooper raced clear of the Crusaders defence to poke the ball low past the Crusaders keeper 11 minutes from the end.<\/p>\n
The remaining 15 fifth round ties take place on Saturday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coleraine booked their place in the sixth round of the Irish Cup with a comfortable 4-0 win over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-403303","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}