Valiant Efforts Result in a Tie
Wednesday brought us our first cloudy match of the year. On our way down to Concord, we passed through a bit of rain – just enough to leave the field wet. However, our boys were excited to take on St. Paul’s. A year ago, when we faced them we lost 0-5, so we were eager to correct that mistake.
In the first couple of minutes, the ball came in close to both ends only twice. Then in the third minute, Ryder Perry receives a pushing foul inside the box. Alvaro Campos elected to take the penalty kick. His shot was deflected by a diving goalkeeper and Ian Surgenor stepped up to make the second attempt. Unfortunately, his shot went just wide of the far post. St. Paul’s had successfully avoided being scored upon.
The game was exciting as we saw shots on goal by Simon Nowlin, Ryder, Dan Pimentel, Devon LeBlanc, and we witnessed several diving saves from Goalkeeper, Bleyton Hopps-Thompson.
With seventeen minutes left on the clock, St. Paul’s left midfielder gained possession of the ball and launched an ICBM that squeaked into the upper far corner of our next. At halftime, Bleyton apologized for misjudging the ball, but Coach reassured him: “Bleyton, if you had a step ladder with you, I don’t think you could have saved that ball.” It was an amazing shot.
Unfortunately, a few minutes later Angus Spence takes a knee to the eye and had to be benched for the rest of the game. We missed his skills, but he gained a nice shiner.
Then with about nine minutes left in the half, Ian draws a foul from a dangerous play inside the box and we get our second attempt at a PK. This time, Ian calmly stepped up to the ball and neatly put it in the net to tie things up. This got PS fired up and Bleyton had to perform several more beautiful saves.
At the end of the half, we were at 1-1.
The second half was a back-and-forth game. Our defensive line of Jacob Hebbel, Aiden Bean, Michael Jung, Eric Chung, and Cho Man Bian did an amazing job keeping the front line away from Bleyton. Although he had to work, very often the offensive drives were thwarted.
In the middle, Tom Huang, Adi Lesbek, Matt Fussteig, and Mikey Winham kept feeding the ball up to our speedy forwards: Ian, Alvaro, Dan, and Will Sewell. All-in-all, it was a hard-fought match and at the end of a total of eighty minutes of play, the final score was 1-1. We had played better than we had a year ago and so were pleased with the results.
On Friday we face off against Holderness at home at 4:00. It will be Family Weekend and hope that we will get back the talents of Leo Barta, Sebastian Keen, and Finn Buck who missed our last game for various reasons. The match should prove to be exciting.
