Cowlishaw and Richmond Kickers ready to defend USL-2 title Saturday

By Travis Clark

In any sport, defending a championship is never an easy task. That is true even in the six-team regional league of USL-2, North American soccer\'s third division. But this Saturday the Richmond Kickers will look to make it two in a row when they visit the Charleston Battery at Blackbaud Stadium in South Carolina this Saturday at 6 p.m., live on Fox Soccer Channel.

“I wouldn’t say it was a perfect season,” head coach Leigh Cowlishaw told Potomac Soccer Wire in a phone interview this week. “We had a very slow start, as we’ve had in the last couple of seasons, and at one stage we were more than 10 points behind Charleston.”

Yet Cowlishaw’s team rose to the occasion down the stretch, then beat the Pittsburgh Riverhounds 2-0 in the USL-2 semifinals last weekend. Now they are set to write another chapter in the surprisingly rich history of the Charleston-Richmond rivalry.

“That’s a rivalry that goes back till 1993,” Cowlishaw said. “I think that was the first time the teams came into the realms of professional soccer before MLS, and they pretty much played each other on a regular basis ever since.”

The two sides have met four times this season, splitting the series down the middle, with the home side always coming away victorious. With so many matches already played between each other, it creates a level of familiarity but Cowlishaw plans on ensuring the approach to the title game is different.

“The mentality for us is not going to play Charleston away from home in a league game,” Cowlishaw said. “We’re going in, playing in the last game of the season, in the final, in a stadium we’re very familiar with, on a surface we love to play at in front of a big crowd. Couldn’t be better for us.”

Still, it will be a difficult task. Charleston won the regular season title in USL-2, automatically clinching a spot in the final a year after dropping down from the first division.

Cowlishaw was quick to identify their forward duo as one of their biggest threats.

“I think their two forwards have proven to be a lethal combination this year. [Lamar] Neagle has scored a lot of goals, but his partner in crime [Tom] Heinemann has taken a lot of weight off him. He holds the ball well, his work rate is exceptional, so those two certainly have proven to be the top partnership in the league.”

Neagle is a finalist for USL-2 MVP, and finished at the top of the league with 12 goals on the year. He’ll no doubt prove to be a handful for the Kickers’ back line.

Richmond counters with a goal-scoring hero of their own in the form of Matthew Delicate, an MVP finalist who finished just one tally behind Neagle for the league lead. Delicate began his professional career in Richmond after attending college at nearby Virginia Commonwealth University and returned in 2009 after a stint with the Rochester Rhinos.

“He scores goals,” Cowlishaw said. “He’s done that consistently for the Kickers, over several seasons. You know that if he gets an opportunity, he’s more than likely to score. I think he’s probably the most lethal goal scorer in the league, and to have a player on your team who can do that builds a lot of confidence.

"The key for us is to have other players step up and produce that same type of goal-scoring ability during Saturday’s game.”

But to overcome the Battery, Cowlishaw needs a complete team performance on the defensive side of the ball, something that the team achieved towards the end of the campaign.

“At the end of the season, we only conceded one goal in the last five. That speaks volumes to the whole group\'s work rate. You can’t have that kind of defensive record unless you have the whole team committed to the defensive organization and the defensive work rate.”

On Saturday, Richmond needs just one more such effort from Cowlishaw’s charges in order to complete a successful title defense.

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Travis Clark is a freelance writer in the Washington, DC area. He holds his Masters of Publishing from the University of Sydney, and has been published in FourFourTwo Australia, The Seattle Times, MLSsoccer.com, The Soccer Magazine, Denver Post and The Dallas Morning News.