Aces Soccer Report From Coach Ed Berberich:
MCHS Boy’s Soccer Recap - @ Vincennes Rivet
The Soccer Aces traveled to Vincennes to take on the Rivet Patriots early Saturday morning and came out with a 2-1 win to remain unbeaten on the season. The Aces scored first in the 8th minute when Beau Stipp finished on an assist from Iacopo Clementi. The Aces gifted the Patriots a bad luck goal just a minute and a half later when a pass back to their goalie ended in a mishap in receiving the ball, which found it’s way into the back of the net. The half ended at a 1-1 tie. Stipp gave the Aces the lead again in the 42nd minute on a left-footed finish off an assist from Britton Heinrich with a key pass provided by Ethan Belt. That would end up being the game winning goal as neither team was able to score the rest of the way. For the match the Aces took 31 shots, 17 on frame, created 13 chances, took 9 corners and had 10 interceptions. The Patriots took 3 shots and 1 corner. Tye Kanipe had 3 saves in goal.
This was a frustrating game for us. We were able to control the ball throughout the match and got off a ton of shots, the most we’ve had in 1 game so far in fact, but we just weren’t able to get the ball in the net. Rivet’s goalie made some big stops, and their defense was pretty physical, & also for most part pretty composed back in front of their own goal and they didn’t give us a lot of room to move between them, especially in the 1st half. Because of their defense packing it in, we settled for a lot of longer shots instead of working closer and looking for the best option. In the 2nd half, we did a much better job of moving the ball around in the attacking 3rd & creating quality shots for ourselves, we just ended up missing a lot of opportunities that we normally would finish off. We needed a game like this though. We haven’t had a truly close game all season, at least not one that went down to the wire like this one, so it was good for us to have to battle through some frustration and gut out a win when things weren’t quite going our way. I’m proud of the guys for keeping their heads up and playing their game, even when the finishing was such a struggle today. The errant shots kind of got in our heads a bit and because of that we ended up pressing on our shots throughout the game, but we kept working together to get good opportunities. I’m pretty confident in these guys finishing off more of those chances moving forward, it was just one of those games today. We were also without Checco Terna and Jarrett West, 2 of our 3 starting center midfielders, in this one so the guys were dealing that but they worked their way through it. We had Clementi and Eli Bertram step up and do a great job in those 2 spots, which was huge for us. And as they've done all year, the defense did a great job of denying opportunities, which allowed us to work through our scoring issues in this one. Overall, this was a big game for us. If you just look at the score it might fool you, but Rivet has kept their scores low all season, and considering the type of games we’ve had so far, and the players we were missing today, this was an important win for us.
The Aces now stand at 9-0 (JV: 2-0) on the season, and travel again next Wednesday to face Mt Vernon IL at 4:30 pm for a varsity/JV contest.
