“It wasn’t a beautiful game,” Don McGovern, who coaches East Hampton High’s boys soccer team, said on leaving the field after last Thursday’s 2-0 loss — the first of the league season for the Bonackers — to Half Hollow Hills West.
Hills West plays a different brand of soccer than East Hampton, preferring to keep the ball in the air, rather than on the ground, as the Bonackers do, trusting that its forwards will chase the ball down. But against a team like Hills West, whose players are uniformly taller, it’s the set plays — the free kicks and corner kicks and throw-ins — that can give East Hampton’s players, however wonderfully they handle the ball, real trouble. The loss called to mind Hills West’s shocking 1-0 win here in a county playoff semifinal clash two years ago.
And so it was last Thursday. The Colts scored off a throw-in from the left corner in the 25th minute, as the result of a flick that beat the home team’s keeper, Randy Japa, to the right corner of the cage, and in the 71st, following a corner kick into the scrum that had formed in front of Bonac’s goal.
East Hampton had its chances; two seeming goals, as a matter of fact, one in the 20th minute launched by Jonathan Armijos and one in the 33rd, were parried by Hills West defenders, the latter by way of a bicycle kick that kept the ball from sailing into the right side of the nets.
Attesting to their eagerness, the Bonackers were flagged for being offsides seven times in the first half.
“We can be successful with our ground game versus these kick-and-chase teams — we’ve been so in the past, but we’ve got to stop giving up corner kicks and throw-ins,” McGovern said when asked during Friday’s practice how East Hampton could beat a team like Hills West. That, and develop a scoring threat like those East Hampton has boasted of in the past, strikers like Ernesto Valverde, Nick West, Esteban Valverde, Mario Olaya, and Eric Armijos. “We know what we’ve got to do, we know we’ve got to finish,” McGovern added. “We’ll learn from this and get better.”
One of the captains, McGovern said, had told him in the postgame huddle that he and his teammates were sad. “Don’t get sad,” said the coach, “get mad.”
The loss knocked East Hampton out of first place in League VI, at 3-1-0 (as was Hauppauge too as of Friday), behind Amityville, which was 3-0-1, the tie having been with Hills West. “Hills West was up 3-0 at the half, and Amityville came back with three goals in the second,” said McGovern, whose team is to play Amityville here today at 4:30.
Going into the week, Amityville in first place was trailed by East Hampton, Hauppauge, Half Hollow Hills West at 2-1-1, Comsewogue (2-2-0), Eastport-South Manor (1-3-0), Harborfields (1-3-0), and Westhampton Beach (0-4-0).
In another game last week, on Sept. 9 at Harborfields, East Hampton won 1-0, thanks to a goal by Juan Salcedo three minutes into the first sudden-death 10-minute overtime period.
East Hampton was to have played at Westhampton Beach on Monday.
