Comets Breeze Past Dallas in Season Opener

The Missouri Comets opened the 2014-2015 inaugural season of the MASL last night in Dallas against the Dallas Sidekicks. The Sidekick had been a solid playoff team last year in the PASL, losing just 2 games, and going undefeated at home.

Last night though, the Comets showed the talent gap that would appear to exist between the old MISL and the PASL teams. Missouri took the game to the Sidekicks, jumping out to a 4-0 lead and holding a 6-2 lead at half time before winning 13-4.

With the new single point scoring system, that the Comets play the score may not look as impressive as other wins may have last year, but against a Dallas side that was pretty good and was very good at home, the win is impressive.

The Comets got goals from seven different players in the game, including four from Leo Gibson and three from Vahid Assadpour both of whom also chipped in two assists. Assadpour opened the scoring just under four minutes into the game. Shortly after, Alain Matingou scored his first goal for the Comets to double the lead. Brian Harris, last year's MISL Finals MVP finished the first quarter scoring a few minutes before the break.

The second quarter saw the Comets continue their strong play as Gibson got his first of the game just over a minute into the game. Dallas did find the net just before the 10 minute mark in the quarter, but the Comets responded two times before the half as Gibson scored on a shoot out attempt and Coady Andrews scored on the break to make it 6-1 before Dallas scored a second seconds before half time to end the half at 6-2.

The third quarter, the Comets were able to extend their lead. After Milan Ivanovic and Dallas' Cameron Brown traded goals early on, the Comets scored four unanswered goals through Assadpour, Andrew Braithwaite, and two more power play goals from Gibson to end the quarter up 11-3.

The Sidekicks cup into the lead in the fourth and ended Missouri's string of goals early in the quarter. The Comets though seemed content to sit back some and just let the clock run out. They did find time though to add two more goals late in the quarter as Ivanovic and Assadpour both found net again to finish off Dallas 13-4.

The Comets will now head to Chicago to take on another former PASL team, last year's champions the Chicago Mustangs. So it'll be a champ vs champ match up. This may be the bigger test of the talent level between the old MISL teams and the PASL teams.