Varsity Boys Soccer tied with Lynbrook High School 0-0 on Thursday, Jan. 23 in its sixth league game of the season, bringing its league record to 3-1-2 for the season, and 8-2-4 overall. The Matadors are now tied with Saratoga High School for second place in the league, but LHS holds the tiebreaker due to its recent win over MVHS.
Despite the lack of scoring from both sides, both schools had great opportunities to win. In the first half specifically, MVHS was able to get off multiple shots on goal, though they were all unsuccessful. Similarly, LHS was able to break into attack a few times throughout the game, but were ultimately unsuccessful at scoring as well.
Freshman and starting center defending midfielder Hossein Dastgah believes the team was in prime position to win due to their multitude of shots on goal, but attributes the team’s tie to its inability to capitalize on opportunities in the attacking third of the field.
“The back line did a good job holding the defense down,” Dastgah said. “But I think going forward, we aren’t going to win many games if we can’t get shots, based off what happened today. After the first half, we should have tried something different to attack, because what we were doing wasn’t working.”
Senior Spandan Dutta, the team’s captain and starting center back, agrees that the team needs to work on finishing opportunities. However, as the leader of the defense, Dutta believes that his group did a great job limiting the Vikings to taking difficult shots, and keeping the ball on the other side of the field.
“Allowing 0 goals has been an emphasis for us all season, so it was nice to see us achieve that,” Dutta said. “All week in practice, we’ve been working on playing out of the back and like just not losing the ball, so it’s always a good game when we are able to do that.”
Despite being disappointed by the outcome of the game, both players believe that the team shows promise going forward to future league games. Specifically, Dutta claims that improvement starts at practice, with more players showing up and being aggressive, which he claims will naturally translate to games.
“In future practices, we need to work on corner kicks more,” Dutta said. “We do a lot of attacking drills but we need to specifically work on capitalizing on corners in order to score more.”
Similar to the players, Head Coach Pancho Tzankov believes that his team needs to improve on putting the ball in the back of the net, and do a better job at creating opportunities. In fact, he believes that the Matadors actually dominated most of the game, in terms of time of possession as well as number of opportunities that the team had to score.
However, as the game went on, Tzankov noticed that the Vikings were “parking the bus,” meaning that they just emphasized defense rather than attacking. This led to severe mismatches in terms of number of Matador attackers and Viking defenders, making it extremely difficult to score.
“We were the better team today, we just couldn’t finish our chances,” said Tzankov. “They parked the bus the whole game so it became very hard to score, but if we keep playing like this, we’ll win a lot of games.”