By TOM ZEBOLD
USF Senior Writer
TAMPA – The title hungry Bulls left nothing to chance Wednesday night.
Dom Dwyer scored two goals, senior Sebastien Thuriere added one in between and the No. 5 USF men's soccer team secured at least a share of the Big East Red Division title with a 3-0 victory over Cincinnati before a very pleased crowd of 1,498 at Corbett Soccer Stadium.
“It has actually been our goal the whole year,” Thuriere said. “I don't think people really had a lot of respect for us this whole year. It was very, very important for us to prove ourselves.”
USF (12-2-2, 7-0-1 in Big East) can win the title outright Sunday with a victory at Rutgers, which kept hope alive for its share of the hardware Wednesday with a 1-0 overtime win over St. John's.
“Tomorrow we're going to be back out training, just trying to improve some more,” Thuriere said. “We're going to focus on our game Sunday.”
The Bulls have won their past seven straight games and were in full stride from the start Wednesday night.
Dwyer put USF ahead, 1-0, on an assist by Ashani Fairclough in the ninth minute, which thoroughly pleased George Kiefer. The head coach had challenged his Bulls during the week to get on their opponent early in the game and avoid a slow start like past contests.
“We've been starting a little bit slow the last couple of games. We made it our goal to start out strong, get out quick and get them behind early,” Dwyer said.
Wednesday was senior night for USF and one of its two honored came through early in the second half. Ben Sweat and Dwyer put together a nice sequence, and Thuriere buried a shot into the left side of the net in the 56th minute.
“In my eyes, I actually had easy work to do,” said Thuriere, who had another huge goal in 2008 when he scored the game-winner in the Big East Tournament championship.
Dwyer put the icing on the celebratory cake about a minute later when he got an assist from Wesley Charpie and pulled into a tie for the national lead with his 16th goal of the season.
“Wes put a great ball in for the third one, the goalie spilled it and I was there to jump on it,” Dwyer said. “Three-nil. Game over.”
The Big East Red Division trophy was shipped in well before Wednesday night's game and Kiefer was impressed with his team's focus on the goal at hand – taking care of business on the pitch.
“It would have been an easy game to look past. I was pleased with their approach to go up early and to get two more,” Kiefer said.
This is USF's first Red Division title since 2005 and Thuriere embraced the Bulls' journey to achieving one of the team's few goals of the season.
“The past seven games have been great team wins,” he said. “We've been training really hard, so it's good to see hard work paying off.”
