At one point during the regular season, the Hilltoppers had reeled off eight consecutive shutouts — a real credit to Negoesco's European style defense. The players who made the defense click were mid-fielders Edgar Sagustume, Lorenzo Cumplido and John Miklewright and defense men Pancho Ruiz, Chuy Bracamontes, Al Werner, and the scrappy Mike Galligan. The backbone of this tenacious defensive unit was the goalie combination of Bill Rapp and Steve Carvajal who between them, minded relatively clean goals.
Captain Al Werner was intense—he wanted this game badly. Four year vet Edgar Sagastume was as psychologically up as anyone—he remembered the 1969 fiasco in the finals and wanted to settle the score with St. Louis. Mike Galligan, Bill Rapp, Leon Heitman, and Steve Carvajal were getting themselves mentally worked up for the jobs they had to do that night. On the other side of the coin were the looser members of the team. These men—Pancho Ruiz, Luis Lefaure, Chuy Bracamontes, Lencho Cumplido, Bill Mejia, and Fernando Ochoa—laughed, sang and fooled around right up to game time. Then there were the ball players who really could not discern right out—could not make out whether they were nervous or calm. People like John Miklewright, Alex Roboostoff, Kelly Hagan, Ray Silva, Kevin Dineen, and Les DeLeon encountered no personality change, yet one was not really sure that they were not indeed in deep inward thought about the game (TheFoghorn).
