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Cardinals suffer painful loss at home to Eagles, 20-17, after field goal by Matt Ammendola fades wide right

Cardinals suffer painful loss at home to Eagles, 20-17, after field goal by Matt Ammendola fades wide right


The Eagles had taken a three-point lead with 1:45 left, and Murray went to work, executing a final drive that wasn’t without mistakes – Murray overthrew a wide-open tight end Zach Ertz at one point in the drive some 25 yards downfield – but that led to what turned out to be a sequence the Cardinals will remember for a while.

With the clock running after a first-down pass at the Philadelphia 34, Murray spiked the ball to kill the clock. On second down, Murray raced up the middle to gain what he – and coach Kliff Kingsbury – thought was 10 yards and another first down.

Except it wasn’t. Kingsbury called to spike the ball to save the clock thinking it was first down, and by the time it was realized the officials deemed Murray’s slide on the run to be a yard short, a second spike play was already underway.

“I was right there and thought he was clearly past (the line to gain) and they brought it back, and by that time we had committed to clocking it,” coach Kliff Kingsbury said.

“I’ll have to look it. … At that point, if we had tried to switch to a run, you’re scrambling to get your kicker a ‘hurricane’ field goal.”

Kingsbury said it probably didn’t make a big difference. The Cardinals might have gained a few more yards in subsequent plays, but he acknowledged being so far from the end zone he likely wouldn’t have tried any shots in the end zone and potentially wrecking a chance at the game-tying field goal.

“Obviously, it sucks,” Ammendola said. “It’s a bad feeling. But you have to keep pushing. You have to bounce back through adversity.”

Ammendola said the kick felt good off his foot, and he had felt good all game.

But Pugh’s assessment wasn’t wrong. Had the Cardinals not again fallen into an early hole – they were down 14-0 in the second quarter and didn’t score in the first quarter for a fifth time in five games – the late field goal might not have mattered. If Hollywood Brown hadn’t dropped a pass over the middle in stride right before halftime, he might’ve run all the way to the end zone instead of the drive ending in a short field goal right.

If the defense, which was excellent after the first two Philadelphia touchdowns, had been able to get the Eagles off the field a little sooner on a final field-goal drive that ate up almost eight minutes of the fourth quarter, there would’ve been more time to work with at the end.

Even the bad luck hit wrong – safety Jalen Thompson got the wind knocked out of him on the final Eagles pass attempt that fell…

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