BELLVILLE – The most eagerly awaited season in the Madison football team’s recent history got off to a great start Friday night.
Joey Walker made sure of that.
Walker, a junior forward, scored two goals as the Rams opened with a 3-1 win over Clear Fork at Colt Corral.
Veteran Madison coach Tim Lord welcomed back a wealth of talent from a team that finished third in the Ohio Cardinal Conference last fall. The Rams were 12-4-1 in 2023.
“If we keep our heads cool and stay humble and realize we can win with 11 players instead of two, I think we’ll be really good,” Lord said. “We believe we are.”
The Rams broke the ice in the sixth minute when Mason Jacobus sent a ball into the box from the right wing. The ball bounced off a Clear Fork defender and landed on the right foot of Nate Evans, who put it past diving Clear Fork goalkeeper Hayden Wilson for a 1-0 lead.
The score remained 1-0 until the second half, when Walker got going. With 32:02 minutes left in the second half, he scored from the left wing after an assist from Evans and about 15 minutes later, he scored his second goal to make it 3-0 after a perfectly executed one-two with Ashton Taylor.
“Our offense is super strong this year,” Walker said. “It starts with our defense. We have a great defense that supports us and we are able to move the ball up the field.”
“We’ve been playing together since we were little and I think that helped.”
The Colts took the lead with a long-range goal by Sam Swendal, who was celebrating his birthday. With 4:46 minutes left in the game, he fired the ball into the top corner from around 40 meters out.
“We talked about it at halftime. We said (the Madison goalkeeper) was going to stay out there a little bit and (Swendal) had the leg for it,” said Clear Fork coach Nate Gailey. “I was really happy for him.”
Despite the defeat, Gailey was pleased with his team’s performance.
“We knew before the season started that Madison was one of the top teams in the entire region,” Gailey said. “We knew what to expect.”
“I told the guys I’m proud of them. We saw a few things that we didn’t do so well two weeks ago, but they’ve now fixed them. This is the first game. We still have 16 games to go.”
