By Allison Goldsmith
I&M Sports Editor
The week after qualifying for the playoffs, the boys varsity soccer team was shut out in back to back games. The Whalers lost a close 1-0 contest on the Vineyard last Wednesday and fell to playoff-bound Coyle Cassidy 2-0 at home on Saturday.
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Photo by Bevin Bixby
Fransisco Mancia, right, brings the ball downfield and away from his Coyle Cassidy opponent during Saturday’s game. The Whalers lost 2-0. |
Tuesday’s contest against Provincetown was forfeited by the Fishermen, awarding the win to the Whalers, who improved to a perfect 5-0 in the Lighthouse Conference.
With the two losses, Nantucket dropped to 8-5-4 overall with one game remaining on the schedule. The Whalers will host Sturgis tomorrow afternoon to wrap up the conference and regular-season schedule. A victory over the Storm would give the Whalers their third straight league crown.
“We have a lot of down time. We have to wait all week to play Sturgis, then we have to wait another week for the playoff brackets,” head coach Rich Brannigan said. “We are going to work on getting some players healthy, we are going to work on fitness, we are going to work on attacking the goal with some kind of energy, some kind of speed and hopefully show up to play on Friday against Sturgis.”
The Whalers will certainly benefit from the time to rest some players who have been nursing injuries late in the season.
“We don’t really have the deepest of benches after we lost all the other guys. Having everyone healthy could be a good thing,” Brannigan said.
Against Coyle Cassidy on Saturday at home, the Whalers struggled to get up to speed against a Warriors’ squad that was fighting for a berth in the postseason tournament.
“They were more motivated to play than us. I think that basically we just didn’t show up to play, period. We were flat for two games this year – one was the Cohasset 3-2 loss away and the other was the home game with Coyle Cassidy,” Brannigan said. “Hopefully us deciding we don’t want to play is done with. You don’t want to have a disappointment against Sturgis. This is the best Sturgis team I have ever coached against and they could easily surprise us if we played the way we played on Saturday.”
The Warriors scored once in each half to earn the victory over Nantucket. Russell Bartlett made 14 saves in goal.
Against the Vineyard last Wednesday, the Whalers played a much stronger game, battling their archrivals for 80 minutes. Neither team could get anything going offensively.
“The Vineyard couldn’t beat us that day. They couldn’t beat our defense, they couldn’t beat our goalie. They had a lot of run of the play and we were able to get them on their heels a little bit as far as the counter-attack, but it wasn’t enough to break them,” Brannigan said.
The head coach was prepared to settle for the 0-0, but with less than 10 minutes to go, the Vineyard capitalized on a fluke play.
“Our defense had made a nice stand and channeled the ball out of bounds for a goal kick. Everyone knew it was a goal kick. The Vineyard stopped pursuing the ball, everyone started to push up and the referee points to the corner and awards a corner kick to the Vineyard,” Brannigan said.
The Vineyard had a player in the area, who immediately volleyed the cross in front of the goal. With the defense dropping back to receive the goal kick, there was no one in the box to defend Nico Cuba, who knocked it in for the only goal of the game.
“There wasn’t really much time left and from that point on it wasn’t like we had chances to tie it or they had chances to score, it was the same game. They couldn’t beat us and we couldn’t beat them and it was a 0-0 game,” Brannigan said. “It was definitely frustrating and our guys were really demoralized at the end of that one. They knew we had basically tied the game.”
The defense of Devon Kohler, Henry Farrell, Jasper Young and Carlos Portillo played another solid game in front of Bartlett in net, he said.
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