Turnover Hurt Squires In Loss
09 Oct 2008

by Eric Christiansen
Friday night was one the Manchester High School football team seniors would rather forget.
Playing in their final regular season home game, the Squires turned the ball over five times and had no answer for Southwood in a 36-7 loss to the Knights.
Southwood’s Nick Driskill led the Knights with 181 yards and one touchdown on the ground.
Meanwhile, the Squires coughed up the ball five times, and Southwood took advantage.
After Spencer Krhin scored the first of his three touchdowns, Manchester fumbled the football on a snap, giving the ball to the Knights on the Squire 41 yard line.
Southwood took night plays made it 10-0 on a 28 yard field goal from Chase Enyeart.
Manchester’s Dylin Kennedy was then picked off, giving the ball to the Knights on the 32 yard line.
Krhin found Driskill who scored on a 10 yard touchdown strike to make it 16-0 at halftime.
“Turnovers killed us Friday night,” Manchester coach Brandon Baker said. “We had five turnovers and they capitalized on all of them. We need to take better care of the ball. We played with more emotion and more enthusiasm but didn’t execute very well.”
In the second half, Kennedy was picked off for the second time, as Krhin ran back a 31 yard interception for a score, making it 23-0.
Manchester bobbled the ensuing kick off, which was recovered by Tyler Rees at the 18 yard line.
Four plays later, Krhin scored on a one yard touchdown run. The extra point made it 30-0 with 2:33 left in the third.
The Knights made it 36-0 when Krhin scored his third touchdown of the night on a 26 yard scamper.
The Squires scored late in the game on a Kyle Henderson run. Henderson led the Squires with 142 yards on 21 attempts, but Baker wasn’t impressed with his team’s effort.
“We didn’t do a very good job of running the ball,” he said. “They had four guys against our six and seven and we couldn’t sustain drives. I don’t know why we weren’t able to run. When we saw the defense they were running, we were excited because we had them outnumbered everywhere. We just didn’t get the job done.”
Baker and the Squires also had another problem to overcome, one Nick Driskill.
“Driskill is a very good football player,” Baker said. “We try to spy him during the game with Kyle Henderson. For the most part, we did ok on him. In the fourth quarter he had about 80 yards rushing when Kyle was out of the game. One player didn’t beat us. We didn’t stay under control on defense very well and missed too many tackles.”
Manchester will next travel to Wabash to take on the winless Apaches. In order for the Squires to put a win together, Baker said his team needs to improve.
“We need to put two sides of the game together if we want to win,” he said. “We need to play 48 minutes of intense football and execute our game plan for 48 minutes. We were better with the intensity Friday night, but we didn’t execute. We have to hit our stride now and get something going into sectional.”
The sectional draw is available at www.ihsaa.org.