Johnny Torres felt his team had been making the game harder on themselves in the last three matches — a loss at Xavier and draws against St. John’s and Seton Hall — with 19 shots on goal, but just three goals to show for it. They flipped that script by hitting the net on four of their five shots on goal in a 4-2, come-from-behind win over Butler on Wednesday night at Morrison Stadium.
Sophomore attacking midfielders Jackson Castro and Owen O’Malley scored the first two, redshirt junior forward Duncan McGuire tallied the game-winner, then senior midfielder Charles Auguste nearly tore a hole in the back of the net to put the icing on the cake as the Bluejays improved to 5-3-5 on the season, 2-2-3 in conference play, and jumped from 10th place to a tie with St. John’s for 6th place in the Big East standings with two weeks left in the regular season. Both teams finished with nine total shots and five shots on goal, but Creighton was the more efficient side with an 80% finishing rate on their shots on target compared to 40% for Butler.
“I don’t know if there was any specific thing that clicked,” Castro said. “I think we just stuck to our principles and stuck to the way we play and just kept at it. This time we combined it with some intensity and some game management; we sped up the game when we had to, we slowed it down when we had to, and I think that was big. That’s what helped us win that one.”
Butler got on the board first when a foul in the box barely nine minutes into the match produced a penalty kick goal courtesy of freshman midfielder Joost de Schutter to put Creighton in a 1-0 hole. That sequence combined with the pressure the Bulldogs were applying throughout the early portion of the first half seemed like a recipe for another frustrating night for a Creighton team, who was playing without the service of three defensive starters in Cameron Briggs, Callum Watson, and co-captain center back Mark O’Neill. But Creighton started to build momentum, especially on the right flank as the half wore on. Then Jackson Castro lit the fuse in the 37th minute. The sequence started with a ball over the top of Butler’s back line by junior defender Jake Ashford, who was starting in place of Briggs. Butler goalkeeper Gabriel Gjergji, a fifth-year senior and five-year starter for the Bulldogs, came off his line and left the box to clear it away, but it stayed in bounds and Castro settled it and quickly struck it with his right foot from about 35-40 yards away along the sideline and bent it into the net just inside the far post and out of the reach of Gjergji to tie the match at 1-1 with 8:35 left in the first half.
“He made it look easy,” Creighton head coach Johnny Torres said of Castro’s blast. “That’s a lot harder than it looks, especially when you know you only have a couple of seconds because the goalie is on to him and realizes he maybe gave up the ball on the wrong spot of the field. Jackson’s a special type of player. He’s a very creative player. He thinks outside the box and that’s the way he plays.”
Capitalizing quickly on one of Butler’s first miscues of the match, combined with the fact that they hard to started to build some rhythm in their opponent’s defensive half, allowed Creighton to go into the locker room with some belief despite conceding an early goal.
“That was massive,” Castro said of his goal and the team’s strong finish to the opening half. “It just showed that we can keep fighting. They were killing us in the very beginning for a while on the counterattack, and it just showed that we can get back into it and control the game and start putting the pressure on them.”
It took Creighton a little over 10 minutes to build off the momentum and take the lead in the second half when Owen O’Malley rewarded the Jays for a crisp transition attack. A pair of senior reserves in Diego Dutilh and Alfie Pope — who were responsible for the lone goal in the 1-1 draw at Seton Hall on Saturday — started it off by trapping a Butler defender and winning the ball back about 10 yards in front of the midfield line. Charles Auguste ran onto it and passed it ahead to Jackson Castro. Castro played it back to Auguste, who then one-timed it ahead to O’Malley. The sophomore out of Cary, North Carolina dribbled to his right to clear two back line defenders, then blasted it inside the near post out of the reach of the keeper to give Creighton a 2-1 lead.
That lead was short-lived as senior midfielder Jack Streberger knotted it up at 2-2 with 25:05 left. However, Creighton’s top three attackers on another bit of magic in them. O’Malley started it with a centering pass to Castro, who one-timed it over the top of Butler’s defense where Duncan McGuire caught up to it and chipped it over Gjergji a few yards in front of the 6-yard box for his 10th goal of the season. That gave the Bluejays a 3-2 lead that they would only add to a well-struck ball that Charles Auguste picked up right off the 18-yard line and blasted into the back of the net for the icer in the 88th minute.
McGuire’s 79th-minute game-winning goal marked the fourth time that he, O’Malley, and Castro all scored a goal in the same match this season. Prior to the Butler match, they also did it against Oakland, Omaha, and Villanova.
Along with the four goals, CU also bagged a critical three points to give them a total of nine in Big East play with three matches remaining. They currently sit in a tie for sixth place with St. John’s, but the Red Storm, who played the Jays to a 1-1 draw in Omaha on October 8th, own a golden ticket of a tiebreaker as the only team in the conference who owns a win over league-leading Georgetown. Creighton isn’t worried about those scenarios yet. They got a big win after three disappointing results in a row, and now they have something to build on as their regular season slate winds down with two matches on the road against Marquette and Providence sandwiched around their home finale against DePaul.
“We started out pretty well at the beginning of the season and then we tapered off,” Torres said. “But we understand that we have a lot of games left and this was the first step in the right direction.”
The Bluejays will look to take the second step when they head to Milwaukee on Saturday for a match against the Golden Eagles. First touch at Valley Fields is set for 7:00 p.m.