PHOTO BY: BOB ROCHE.
Ryan Brady of Archbishop Williams races after the ball with St.Mary’s Connor Mackey.
By Steve Krause
LYNN — The St. Mary’s boys soccer team picked the right time to play its best game of the season.
The Spartans came out of the gate on fire Monday evening at Manning Field, putting three goals on Archbishop Williams goalie Frank Boncaldo in the first 40 minutes, and forcing him to make a half dozen more acrobatic saves.
Then, St. Mary’s withstood a mini second-half spurt by the Bishops before settling down and riding out a 4-2 victory that tied the two teams for first place in the Catholic Central League.
A win would have given the Bishops an outright title, and it would have been their second in as many years — both times with the Spartans as runners-up.
Now, both teams have one league game remaining (St. Mary’s is home Wednesday against Cardinal Spellman while Williams is back up this way to face Bishop Fenwick). If both teams win, they’ll tie for the CCL title, which according Williams coach Brian Mitchell, “would seem to be appropriate. We’ve each won one against the other.”
Spartan coach Mike D’Agostino was happy with the win, not only because his team played a great game, but because he wasn’t pleased his team lost the CCL title last year.
“They beat us here to win the title,” he said.
A bit of a rivalry has developed between the two schools, and the fact that St. Mary’s came back last year to defeat Williams in the Eastern Mass. title game, propelling the Spartans into the Division 4 state final, only adds to it.
Monday, D’Agostino said “it was probably the best half we’ve played in a long, long time. The passes were crisp, and the momentum was really going our way.”
Boncaldo was asked to perform heroics immediately when Nolan Perez was all alone in front of the Williams net and put one right on him. He got his leg on it and kicked it aside like a hockey goalie.
“If it weren’t for him,” said Mitchell, “it would have been worse in the first half than it was.”
After a few more saves, one of which ricocheted loudly off the post — making one wonder whether this really was a hockey game in disguise — Olushola George scored the first of his two goals, pulling a Williams defender out of position and kicking the ball in. Nolan Perez’s head ball in the 20th minute, which came after Boncaldo had made the initial save on a shot by George, made the score 2-0; and George, coming out of a timeout, made it 3-0 late in the half.
Williams got rapid-fire goals in the 44th and 47th minutes from Ryan Brady and Pat Hegarty respectively. As a result, D’Agostino adjusted his strategy.
“We really wanted the game,” he said, “so we went heavy on offense. We moved one of our players back after their second goal.”
St. Mary’s restored order after that. And when Chris Garcia set up Kevin Perez, Nolan’s younger brother, for his first varsity goal, the game was academic.
Garcia took the ball as far as he could possibly go with it before kicking it through a traffic jam of Williams players, threading the needle to find Perez, who kicked it to the far side of the net, where it hit the post and deflected in.
Both Williams and St. Mary’s are 9-3-1 overall, and 6-1-2 in the league.