Thunder Bay, ON – The Thunder Bay Chill (2-0-2) head to Winnipeg for their second road trip of the season for two back to back games against WSA Winnipeg (0-4-2) at the WSF Indoor Soccer Complex. Both games are being played indoors due to the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
WSA Winnipeg entered the PDL in 2011, and have only managed 2 wins and 1 tie in 16 tries against the Chill. Thunder Bay has outscored WSA Winnipeg 40-11 during the past 4 seasons. In their last outing WSA Winnipeg gained a tie against the Springfield Synergy, who the Chill managed to beat and tie in Thunder Bay last weekend.
With Daniel Milton not available this weekend, the Chill are looking to a familiar face to be the backstop to six points over the weekend. Daniel Alvarado is coming off an injury but will start in goal on Saturday night. Backing him up will be Michael Miller who was injured in the season opener in St. Louis and has also not been available for the Chill in the last 3 games. Also injured and unavailable this weekend is striker Sullivan Silva. Head coach Giovanni Petraglia said “it will be a difficult weekend for us with new faces in the lineup. I was not completely happy with our performance against Springfield last weekend and we will need to be better to get all six points this weekend.”
WSA Winnipeg’s two wins against the Chill have both come in Winnipeg and both games were early in the season. “We need to be focused and play with a lot of intensity this weekend” said Petraglia. “We don’t want to leave any points in Winnipeg as has been the case in the past” he continued. In fact it was last year that WSA Winnipeg took a 3-2 victory after the Chill had won the first game 2-0 in the back to back games in early June. The Chill are hoping to see more of Pedro Adan this weekend who joined the club just over a week ago. He saw limited action against Springfield. With Silva out, the Chill are looking to Brandon Swartzendruber to score his first goal of the 2015 season. Swartzendruber was a standout in past years but has struggled to find the back of the net to date in PDL action.
The Chill have seven youth teams in Winnipeg this weekend as well and are planning on having over 300 people attend two FIFA Women’s World Cup games this afternoon. The first game will see Nigeria take on Australia and the second game will see the USA face off against Sweden.
The Thunder Bay Chill plays in the 63 team prospect focused Premier Development League (PDL) which is the top developmental men’s league in North America.
