A controversial yellow card Thursday evening squared off Gorham’s Cody Elliot against South Portland freshman goalie Riley Hasson. Elliot handily beat the inexperienced Hasson on the penalty kick, putting the Rams back on top of the Red Riots early in the second half – and for good.
The 2-1 home victory bumped perennially dangerous Gorham to 3-0; South Portland, meanwhile, slipped to 1-2.
A win is a win – nobody turns one down – but despite taking their victory on a disputed PK, Gorham felt satisfied with the competition and the outcome. “I thought we really battled hard,” head coach Tim King said. “Nothing really came easy to us. You have to fight through games like this sometimes. That’s a real good team, South Portland, and we’ll take it any way we can get it.”
Gorham has a strong, proud soccer tradition, perhaps due in part to an open respect for the opposition. “For the past six or seven years,” King said, “South Portland’s been a really good team, and I think they’re one of the top teams this year. They’ve lost a couple tough games, but the thing is wide open. That’s a good squad; they’re going to win a lot of games. Their program has come a long way.”
For his part, South Portland head coach Brian Hoy expressed upset over the yellow card to keeper Henry Curran and subsequent penalty kick. “They took that one away from us. My goalie got run down twice in the first half, he got bumped into. He picks up the ball, kid’s coming at him, he throws a shoulder into him, he’s just trying to protect himself. If the refs won’t do it, he’s got to do it.”
Gorham jumped on a 1-0 lead after just nine minutes, when Ethan Orach’s corner kick dropped precisely into the leaping knot of bodies out front of South Portland keeper Curran. From the jostle for supremacy emerged the head of Ram Gerek Brown, who redirected the ball surgically into the Riots’ net.
King readily praised Brown, and not just for his offensive contribution. “(He) scored the first goal, and played great defense,” King said, before also highlighting Elliot’s impact: “Cody was phenomenal today.”
South Portland suddenly found themselves playing catch-up, but their determination never flagged. Senior captain Silas Zechman, on defense, and junior midfielder Ahmed Suja took a particularly vocal role – audible from the sidelines – in rallying their teammates to the tying moment, which came with just about five minutes to play before the break.
On a Riots’ corner inward, Gorham goalie Trenton Bassingthwaite leapt, but couldn’t quite get his fingers on the ball. Here Suja, running heavy mid-air interference on Bassingthwaite, may have made all the difference; the kick sailed just out of Bassingthwaite’s reach to land on open grass behind him – where South Portland’s Kervens Anthione picked it up and fired it off for the levelling score, 1-1.
Infractions soon cost the Riots, though: first, critical midfielder Andrew Whipple took his Rams man down in too-rough a fashion. For that, Whipple earned a yellow card and 10-minutes on the bench. The penalty bled over into the second half, and before Whipple’s punishment had even expired, Curran drew a yellow card of his own, as his collision with an incoming Gorham player was ruled flagrant.
King felt the uptick in aggression as the game elapsed was fairly even on both sides. “That happens. You just need to be able to – we talk about all the time – control your emotions. Things are not going to go great during the course of a game, and you’ve got to fight through it.”
Curran had no choice but to step aside. Hasson came in to face Elliot for the fateful PK, and suddenly the Rams were back on top.
“I’m really proud of my kids for hanging tough through that,” Hoy said. “Because a lot of times, when something happens like that, teams have a tendency to get down on themselves and go away, and we definitely did not do that.”
South Portland still had 34 minutes to pull even again, and they generated their fair share of chances to do so. In the end, though, the Rams’ defense won out, and Gorham walked away with the 2-1 triumph.
“We came back and had a couple really good opportunities for a goal,” Hoy said. “We played really hard, we played really well. We’re doing the right things, we’re getting better. It’s just a matter of time before we clean all that other stuff up and take care of business.”
“It looked like they lost their composure a little bit on that play,” King said. “And that happens sometimes, when kids get in the battle of things. And we took advantage of it.”
Riots senior captain and defender Silas Zechman heads a ball across the field at Gorham Thursday evening. Despite Zechman’s vocal, effective leadership, South Portland fell to the Rams 2-1.
Gorham junior Cody Elliot cuts hard right, away from Silas Zechman’s tight coverage.
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