The best team, which is to say East Hampton, did not win in a Class A soccer semifinal playoff game contested here with Half Hollow Hills West Monday. The 1-0 loss left Don McGovern, his players, and a crowd that had filled the bleachers stunned.
It was a fight between a team that continually played the ball in the air and one that advanced it with deft passes on the ground, and though there were four referees, one wondered at times if there shouldn’t have been more, as bodies flew and collided, as elbows were thrown, and as shirts were yanked.
It took almost 20 minutes for East Hampton to get a call on a 50-50 ball. After a hand ball by a defender in the visitors’ penalty area in the 54th minute went unremarked upon, the Colts, who hard largely been on the defensive in the second half, scored in the 57th, as Darin Sahadeo, a senior midfielder, converted a ground-hugging cross from Zachary Wernik, who had beaten his defender into the right corner. The Colts had a chance to make it 2-0 in the 66th minute after Ryan Levy was taken down in the box, but Nicholas Guerrero, Bonac’s goalie, made a great save.
Twenty-three minutes were left to play following Hills West’s score, but though the Bonackers continued to attack relentlessly they could not come up with the equalizer, the closest call being Jeremy Ortiz’s corner-kick header in the 71st minute that Hills West’s goalie just managed to tip back over the crossbar.
Eric Armijos, who had been deprived of a seeming goal by a questionable offsides call with 10 and a half minutes to go in the first half, was the last Bonacker to touch the ball – his shot from 30 yards out sailing wide to the right – before the visitors rushed wildly down the field to celebrate and as he and his teammates, despondent, slumped to the turf.
McGovern agreed afterward that his league-championship team was still a great one – one of the best he’d ever had. As for the game, “it was a brutal one where one team created many chances but didn’t finish, and where the other team finished the best chance it had.”
When this writer said, “The best team didn’t win,” East Hampton’s coach, who took the loss every bit as hard as his players did, said, “Soccer can be like that.”
East Hampton, which won League IV with a 9-1 record, finished at 12-3 over all. Last Thursday, in a Class A quarterfinal here, the Bonackers bested East Islip, a team along the same lines as Hills West, 2-1 thanks to goals by Armijos and Michael Figueroa.
Hills West is to play the Amityville-John Glenn winner for the county Class A title Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at Comsewogue High School.