The Varsity Blues left the field hanging their heads in disappointment for the first time in the 2012 season after falling to a 3–2 upset against Guelph in CIS round-robin play on Friday. The Blues suffered their first loss of the year against the Gryphons in game five of the FHC-CIS women’s field hockey championship.

Guelph dominated the opening 10 minutes of the game, racing to an early 2–0 lead. The Gryphons opened the scoring in the sixth minute with a goal by Candice Hawkworth from a rebound. Guelph added to their lead four minutes later when Brittany Seidler, the CIS Player of the Year, took advantage of a Toronto turnover to put her team up by two.

“I think we’re the better team,” Toronto head coach John DeSouza affirmed. “I just think we’re tired and we started to make really bad errors from fatigue. What ended up happening is they capitalized on their chances and I don’t think we capitalized on ours.

“We had penalty corners and we didn’t score on them at crucial times.”

Amanda Woodcroft gave the Blues some hope before the half with her second goal of the tournament, to bring the game to within one point.

U of T came out of the half looking for the equalizer and forcing heavy pressure around the Guelph net. Rookie standout Emma Stairs eventually found a crack in the Gryphons’ defense to send the ball rolling over the goal-line for the equalizer.

But with only nine minutes left in the game Seidler displayed precisely why she was chosen Player of the Year, breaking the tie to lead the Gryphons, who are 2–0 in the tournament, to a 3–2 victory.

“We still have a tournament to play,” said DeSouza. “I don’t think we’re out of it by any stretch of the imagination. I mean the tie against UBC is big now. But at the end of the day I think that the schedule caught up to us. We’ve got to recover and we’ve got go out tomorrow and do our thing.”

The Blues are now reliant on favourable results from other round-robin games to progress. First, though, they need to win against the University of Victoria.

“We’re not out of the final by any stretch, there’s a lot of tournament left,” said DeSouza. “We’ll see what happens.”