Boys’ soccer: Lenox likely to reach finals; Spartans have tougher road

The Millionaires’ and Spartans’ boys’ soccer teams are fairly evenly matched, as decided by their recent 1-1 draw at the end of the season. However, as of today, the two seem to be on different paths, yet both have a Western Massachusetts Championship in sight.

For Lenox, a Division 3 team, the Millionaires got off on the right foot on Monday with a convincing 6-0 win under the lights at home over St. Joe’s.

The win puts Lenox in the driver seat the rest of the tournament, as the Millionaires play Smith Academy in the semifinals, a much weaker opponent despite the 13-4-2 record.

Lenox Coach Scott Chadwick is playing down the scenario, but knows if his team puts up big numbers on offense like they did against St. Joe’s – he might not see a tougher opponent until the Central/West title game.

“It’s hard to tell right now, because the other teams play a weaker schedule, but there is something to say about that, because with a better record comes more confidence,” Chadwick said of his remaining western Massachusetts foes.

The Crusaders made the mistake of playing deep in their own box with three defenders and a sweeper, which allowed the Lenox attackers to have a lot of free space in the middle of the field.

“They gave us a lot of time in the middle of the field and with our system that gave us an advantage,” Chadwick said.

Eleven minutes into the game, Lenox’s leading scorer, Andrew Vickery, snuck a header just under the crossbar for the Millionaires’ first goal, on a nice cross-pass from Alex Bennett.

At 23:38, Abdul Al-Henaidi (three goals on the night) added another Lenox goal, a beautiful one-timer into the far right corner St. Joe’s goalie Shaun Parzick had no chance at.

Liam Gennari added the third goal before the half, with a nice right-foot from 20 yards out he easily buried in the back of the net, as the mid-fielder was left all alone by the Crusaders’ defense.

“We were able to use some of our [passing] combinations for our goals there,” Chadwick said of his midfielders.

Moving forward, Chadwick is not concerned with his team’s offense but rather their ability to keep opponents off the board as the team makes their quest to move deeper and deeper in tournament play.

“My only worry is if we can keep it compact defensively – that’s what I am worried about,” Chadwick said. “I know we can score goals, but can we keep other better teams at bay?”

For the Spartans, Matt Naverti’s squad has moved on to the more challenging opponents in the Division 2 tournament, after his team beat a tough Hampshire team on Monday, 2-0, and Putnam in the first round, 4-0.

After the Putnam win, Naverti was concerned a bit of his team’s offensive continuity against a weaker opponent.

“[Putnam] packed it in, and our forwards weren’t moving all that well, and it took us a little while to figure it out,” Naverti said. “We had a lot of good looks but we weren’t finishing well, which hasn’t been the case for us the last couple of weeks – we have a tendency to play down a little bit and I think we did that tonight.”

However, against Hampshire in frigid conditions, the Spartans opened the scoring with a Daniel Huertas goal with the assist going to leading scorer Nick Maseiro, who had two goals against Putnam and added the second goal against Hampshire for the 2-0 win.

“It’s all about effort with [Maseiro],” said Naventi. “He works so hard – he’s going to have his chances, four to five chances a game, and he is going to finish them.”

The Spartans will now face Cinderella South Hadley as they upset the No. 2 seed, Cathedral, 2-1 in overtime.

If Monument can come away with a victory look for either a rematch with Belchertown or Mt. Greylock in the finals, two teams that have beat the Spartans this year.

Posted by Tim Davis on November 8, 2012. Filed under High School Sports,Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry