Devonshire Cougars 4

St George’s Colts 1

Devonshire Cougars clawed their way into the FA Cup quarter finals with an emphatic victory over ten-men St George’s Colts at Devonshire Recreation Club last night.

The First Division side played the final 15 minutes of a physical encounter a man short after Gregory Wade was sent off for violent conduct.

Chae Brangman and Mark Steede both scored twice for Cougars, while Jarraeu Hayward grabbed the only goal for the visiting team, whose performance was far better than the final scoreline suggests.

“It was a scrappy game but the win was all that mattered because this is FA Cup,” Kwame Steede, the Cougars coach, said.

“We got off to a good start but then strayed away from our game plan, which let them back in the game. We went up 2-0 in the first 20 minutes off of how we wanted to play, and they didn’t have a clue. But when we strayed from our game plan they got back into the game.”

With a spot in the last eight of the competition at stake, Cougars went straight for the jugular with Charles Marshall, the St George’s goalkeeper, making a reflex save from point blank range to deny Mark Steede early on.

St George’s responded at the other end with Mitchell Tucker heading Kyle Denbrook’s free kick wide.

The visitors had the better of the early exchanges, but were rocked on their heels in the eleventh minute when Brangman squeezed a shot from 20 yards inside of Marshall’s near post against the run of play.

The dust had hardly settled when St George’s found themselves in a deeper hole after Brangman tapped in Machi Battersbee’s to double Cougars’s advantage.

Despite leaking two goals inside of three minutes, St George’s didn’t panic, and with Oronde Bascome, the midfielder, pulling all the strings in the middle of the park regained the momentum.

Tucker gave an ominous sign of things to come from the visitors when he fired Bascome’s knock down in the box against the near post.

Kioshi Trott, the Cougars goalkeeper, was not be as fortunate as the half drew to an end, when Bascome’s defence splitting pass sent Hayward clear, and the St George’s striker fired the ball in off the near post.

Cougars fell into a slumber in the closing minutes of the first half and were lucky to go unpunished as a rejuvenated St George’s piled on the pressure in search of an equaliser.

A sense of de-ja-vu permeated around the ground as Cougars took the match to their rivals right from the start of the second half, with Marshall having to be at his best to repel Zari Simmons’s shot after the midfielder broke through St George’s last line of defence.

Steede, who played as a lone striker, finally got in on the scoring act when he created space inside the box and blasted into the roof of the net, restoring his side’s two-goal lead.

Steede’s strike let the air completely out of St George’s spirited revival, and any hope the visiting side might have had of mounting a comeback were ended when the big striker grabbed his second, and Cougars’s fourth, after shrugging off three tackles and rolling the ball inside of the near post.

St George’s night went from bad to worst when Wade received his marching orders in the 75th minute. The left back was initially fouled by Battersbee, but stomped on the Cougars forward in retaliation.

With nothing to lose St George’s enjoyed a good spell in the closing minutes, but the damage had already been done by a Cougars side who are back in action on Friday night, when they host fellow Premier Division strugglers, Hamilton Parish, in a crucial game at home.