ERIE, Pa. \u2014 The Flower City Union is heading into the postseason this week with some added motivation.<\/p>\n
The local National Premier Soccer League team, which plays in the fourth tier of the U.S. Soccer Pyramid, earned a playoff spot after a rocky start to the season. The Union began the season with one win, four draws and four losses. Since then, they\u2019ve won three out of four games.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoing into the playoffs now, feeling really confident,\u201d Archie Murphy said.<\/p>\n
Last year, the Union earned a trip to the U.S. Open Cup after winning the Great Lakes Conference. Flower City played in the game prior to this NPSL season, losing to Lexington SC, 9-0.<\/p>\n
Despite their championship pedigree, they enter the postseason as underdogs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe still have that mentality that we are the champions because we are. This is our division, this is our league,\u201d team captain Matt Bamford said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re going to go in the same way on Wednesday and try and prove everybody that we\u2019re still the team to beat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Union faces the number-one ranked team in the conference, Erie Commodores FC, which holds a 10-1-1 record. That one draw came against Flower City Union.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, the last time we played them, their coach said they drew because they wanted to draw, and we took a lot of offense to that because we felt like we played right with them,\u201d Quentin Herrman said. \u201cSo I think that\u2019s in the back of our minds. Him kind of leaving a petty comment like that and we\u2019re using that as a motivation for this game.\u201d<\/p>\n
This time around, no one can tie. Someone\u2019s moving on to the conference final, and the other\u2019s going home.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome say that they tied because they wanted to tie. We say we won because we wanted to win,\u201d assistant coach Ibrahim Kapidzic said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, playoffs is anyone\u2019s game. It\u2019s one game and you get knocked out,\u201d Ewan O\u2019Dwyer-Hall said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah they\u2019re a good team. But I think it\u2019s important we don\u2019t show them too much respect,\u201d Murphy said. \u201cI mean, you know what we\u2019re capable of? We\u2019ll go there, we know how to play against them now. First game we struggled. Second game we went and gave them a really good game. Third game, we\u2019re going to go there and win it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The third meeting of the year between Flower City and Erie is set for Wednesday at Mercyhurst University. Kickoff is set for 8 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ERIE, Pa. \u2014 The Flower City Union is heading into the postseason this week with some added motivation.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[136,138,137],"class_list":["post-238123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}