Two months after it was originally to have been played, the East End men’s 7-on-7 soccer final was finally contested at East Hampton Village’s Herrick Park on Oct. 30, with Maidstone Market, the league’s perennial power, emerging as a 2-1 winner over Tortorella Pools.
The teams finished the regular season tied for first place, each with a 5-2-3 record, and in their two regular season meetings they played to 2-2 ties.
Reseeding in areas of the park on which the league plays its games was given as the reason to hold off so long insofar as the final was concerned after Maidstone had shut out Sag Harbor United 3-0 and Tortorella had defeated Liga de Gulag 6-3 in semifinal matches that were played on Sept. 3. The long-delayed championship game would mean there’d be no fall season this year, Leslie Czeladko, the league’s manager, said in advance of the showdown, contested on an ill-lit and slippery field.
Despite the challenging conditions, Maidstone and Tortorella’s players went at it full tilt throughout the hourlong fray, vying fiercely for possession of the ball. Yet only one player, it seemed — Maidstone’s Danny Bedoya Salazar — was permanently sidelined by an injury, which followed a collision with Tortorella’s Alberto Nieto Zambrano early on.
It was attack and counterattack from the get-go, with the Market having a slight edge, especially when its goalie, Carlos Barahona, took a free kick, from any spot on the field.
Xavi Piedramartel, who had gathered in a pass close to Tortorella’s goal, put his team on the scoreboard with scarcely a minute gone, and midway through the period it seemed Maidstone had scored again, though the referee waved it off “because the guy who passed it did so from the ground . . . you can’t do that.”
A Maidstone free kick from an acute angle, out to the right of Tortorella’s goal, bounced off the crossbar as the second half began. Tortorella’s Leo Moron came close to scoring in the 37th minute as his hard ground-hugger zipped just wide to the left of Maidstone’s cage.
In the 42nd minute, Barahona parried three Tortorella shots in succession, and two minutes later, a Maidstone player was pushed down in the penalty area, occasioning a penalty kick that Barahona, who had come up to take it, buried for a 2-0 Maidstone lead.
Mario Olaya, one of Tortorella’s energetic forwards, was, likewise, taken down in Maidstone’s box as he was on the move in the 50th minute, and, moments later, Nieto Zambrano made the penalty kick, pulling his team within one goal of a tie.
David Rodriguez almost knotted the score with five minutes remaining, though he could not quite catch up to Nieto Zambrano’s long pass in the air toward the left post. Barahona made two saves in the final minutes, preserving the big win as the clock ran down.
