From this week's Flying Kiwis, some great little quotes from Boxall re his somewhat freakish goal last week.
Michael Boxall: “Just give me a knife and fork there and I will finish it off. That doesn’t happen often.”
Michael Boxall: “[I was] just telling myself to smash it home. I saw the keeper there, but I think when he sees a big, ugly 6’2 Kiwi running at him, he didn’t want too much of it. So yeah, I got there first.”
Adrian Heath: “If you look back to the second game of the season, [Boxall] had four or five of them in that game when he nearly made it to the penalty area. Sometimes you don't realize how much space you've got. That was my only disappointment at times: we didn't use the fact that they do play man-to-man and if you clear the space and you open big spaces up, you can actually run the length of the field nearly. But he did great and kept going and got himself a goal.”
Michael Boxall: “I got way too high and the air is a lot thinner out there so I wanted to give it to someone who is better on the ball than me and that’s just about everyone on our team. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I was carrying on the run. I think when I’m running at that speed, it takes a little while for me to slow down… I scored and then I ran along the goal line and I remember seeing all the guys in the bibs warming up so I was like ‘Let’s celebrate with them. But then I was like ‘That’s the other team,’ so probably not a good idea.”
Gorgeous stuff – creative too, using the defender for a wall pass, ingenious. And if he wasn’t already the most quotable of the Flying Kiwis then he surely is now after laying down a selection of Steven Adams worthy yarns about the goal. A goal that then compelled San Jose to go even harder and Vito Mannone made a trio of decent saves to keep the Loons on top before Kevin Molino polished things off at the end, a 3-1 win for Minnesota United in what their gaffer had said was their biggest game of the season. Not bad.