Cleveland State, the Horizon League’s regular season champion and top seed, faced a dire dilemma deep into its conference final meeting with Purdue Fort Wayne on Saturday afternoon.
After untold chances were left wanting, the regulation 90 minutes weren’t enough to settle the affair. The first ten of extra time didn’t do much to help. As the clock spun through the second overtime period, the possibility of penalty kicks – that hated coin flip used to decide soccer outcomes worldwide – became a Sword of Damocles looming over the Vikings’ storybook season.
On the Krenzler Field touchline, CSU head coach Sinisa Ubiparipovic took stock of the situation: “Penalty kicks are in many ways a lottery, right?” His obvious preference was for quick action.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Matteo Correia found a way to avoid leaving things to chance. Champions usually do.
Correia’s header in the 104th minute, roughly six minutes before the tiebreaker would have been deployed, delivered Cleveland State a 1-0 sudden-death HL title over PFW, setting off a frenzy on Chester Avenue.
Midfielder Fefo Granados began the winning sequence when he alertly restarted play immediately in the CSU half of the field, after a Mastodons foul. The Vikings then swung the ball to the left side, where Uros Jevtic played it down the sideline for Paolo Roditti. Roditti took a quick touch, then lobbed a cross towards the center of the PFW penalty area, where Correia was waiting to end the match.
“We were just attacking them the whole game, so I knew once we hit it out wide, [I needed to] just crash the box, something’s going to come to me,” Correia said. “I was just praying for the ball to get to me, and I was going to do the job.”
“We had guys inside the box, we had a great cross, and a great finish with the header,” Ubiparipovic added. “So, I mean, I think the play overall was very good.”
The victory earned Cleveland State its third Horizon League tournament championship overall, and its second in the last four years, following a dominant home sweep of Oakland and IU Indianapolis in the 2022 tournament.
Saturday’s contest was decidedly more dramatic than that year’s final, a 3-0 victory over the Jaguars.
Cleveland State, now 9-3-6 overall, outshot their challengers 20-5, including 10-1 after halftime. Still, Purdue Fort Wayne had its opportunities, particularly during a late first half surge.
On the other end of the field, the Vikings peppered Mastodons goalkeeper Sep Habibi. Notable CSU chances came through Daniel Celso, one of the home side’s best players throughout the afternoon, as well as from Tom Mertz, Djordje Petrovic, and Adrian Bravo-Sanchez.
Midway through the first overtime period, Celso was pushed down from behind in the PFW penalty area while awaiting a pass from Roditti, but no foul was awarded. Purdue Fort Wayne sought their own penalty in the 68th minute when forward Marco Valencia tumbled within the area, though the contact in his case was either slight or nonexistent.
All in all though, particularly compared to a 3-1 CSU victory over the ‘Dons during the regular season, the championship match was a tight affair, particularly as things progressed.
“It’s difficult because at that point you guys know each other’s secrets almost, right?” Ubparipovic said. “They know how you want to play it. We know how they want to play, and then it’s a little bit of a chess match, and I’m sure you saw it for the large portions of their game. And we were trying to figure out where’s the space? Where can we attack? What are the moments that we can take advantage of?”
“We were just attacking them,” Correia said. “We saw that they were so tired, so we took advantage of that, and just kept going, and it paid off.”
It certainly did for Correia, voted the HL tournament’s most valuable player, along with fellow all-tournament selections Mertz, Uzman Ramees, Ryan Poling, and the rest of the Vikings.
With the title in hand, Cleveland State will head to the NCAA Tournament for the 11th time in program history. The team will learn the specifics of that endeavor during a selection show, streamed through NCAA.com, on Monday at 1:00 PM.
“After 2022, we worked super hard,” Ubiparipovic said. “And to be in this situation again, it feels amazing. I want to congratulate, first of all, Fort Wayne for a great match. I think they played really well today, and they came well prepared.”
“But I also want to congratulate our guys who came in and were prepared for this match. We worked extremely hard. They did not give up, and the belief was there.”
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