TWO SIDES TO A STORY -- International goalie Joan Voss comforts Santiago Rosado after Rosado's shot was blocked.Cambridge players celebrate.Jonatan Muñoz, International After overtime, shootout
Knights edge tenacious Griffins
The Cambridge and International varsity boys soccer teams played on into the night in their semifinal match Friday.
And on.
And on.
And on.
The game was tied 1-1 at the end of regulation time: It was still tied 1-1 at the end of two nerve-wracking, nail-biting 10-minute sudden death overtime periods. And the shoot-out was all knotted up at 3-all after the first three penalty shooters had taken their turns.
Somebody was going to have to do something or the game might still be going on. Cambridge goalie Juan Manuel Salas apparently decided at that point that while it might be a dirty job, he would do it.
And he did, making sensational diving blocks of the next two Griffin shooters, and ending the shoot-out in a 4-3 victory for the league-leading Knights.
That punched their ticket to the Big Showdown next Thursday against Christian Learning, most of whose players were on-hand to watch the Cambridge-International semifinal.
The goals in the original game, which were but distant memories by the time the contest actually ended, both involved a large element of . . . how shall we say? . . . well, luck.
Cambridge scored its only goal in the opening minutes of the
game. Eyewitnesses had trouble recounting exactly what happened, but there was apparently a free kick that bounced around for awhile in front of the Griffin goal, caroming at one point off somebody's back.
Martin Pacor at this point (or very shortly afterward), kicked the ball upward with the back of his ankle, just high enough to elude Griffin goalie Joan Voss, and just far enough to go into the goal. Witnesses were unsure as to whether he had done it on purpose or by accident.
The Griffins got their goal shortly after the half when Nicholas "Yeyo" Bedoya launched a huge kick in the general direction of the Cambridge goal from well inside his own zone. The ball either had a tremendous amount of backspin, or hit some small bump in the surface of the field that caused it to hop high into the air and over the head of Cambridge goalie Salas.
And that was it, scoring-wise.
The defense was intense in this game that was eerily similar to the championship game these two teams played a year ago. Same field. Once again under the lights.
The circumstances, however, were quite different. Last year the Griffins had ruled the League, and Cambridge was the resurgent challenger. (International won the championship, 2-1, in overtime.)
On this night Cambridge was the undefeated League champion and the Griffins were the winless last-place team, looking for vengeance. (They did have four ties, though on all four occasions they lost the shoot-out. Friday was to be their fifth such loss, doubtless a record that will stand for many years.)
As in that championship game the play had no pattern. No team dominated for an extended period of time, Play sloshed up and down the field, from one end to the other, with each team having its chances.
However, what usually happened was that after a team had connected with a pass or two, and moved the ball into soccer's equivalent of the "red zone," a defender would come out of nowhere and propel the ball to the other end of the field, where the same pattern would be repeated.
All sorts of interesting battles were unfolding on different parts of the field, but the Christian Learning players will no doubt be studying the game films mainly to figure out one thing: How did the Griffins neutralize Cambridge's Junior Sanchez, who had been averaging almost three goals a game, but who had no scores in this one.
The Griffin strategy was was evidently some sort of shifting and collapsing zone defense. Jose Bedoya apparently had been assigned by Griffin coach Eduardo "Presi" de la Riva to be Sanchez' personal trainer for the evening, and stalked Sanchez step for step everywhere the Cambridge star went on the field.
Sometimes Jose Bedoya was joined by Jorge Capobianco, at others by Mauriciao Nostas. Frequently there seemed to be three Griffins guarding Sanchez, yet somehow that did not mean that there were two unmarked Knights loose on the field.
And Cambridge has other players who cannot safely be left alone with the ball, including Pacor, who is the League's Number Two scorer behind Sanchez, and who somehow also drew plenty of coverage.
Sanchez may also have been having an off night. He had five free kicks from distances at which he often scores goals (or sets one up), and made none of them.
He did come close. Indeed, everybody came close. There was no shortage of adrenalin- triggering near misses, especially in the overtime periods. One Cambridge player, who otherwise had an absolutely brilliant night, at one point in the overtime had a point blank shot at an empty net from close range and somehow chipped the ball over the goal.
But the story of this game was not the goals that were scored or almost scored. It was the goals that weren't scored through two sudden death overtimes as the defenses on both sides hung tough.
Then in the shoot out the question became whether anyone would miss. Daniel Baldivieso, Jorgo Harriague, and Juan Javier Estenssoro connected for International, as did Sanchez, Christopher Cocciani, and Pacor for Cambridge.
Salas then blocked the shots by Alex Roempler and Santiago Rosado, while Nicolas Gamboa connected for Cambridge, ending the shootout at 4-3 for the Knights.
And then, somewhat mercifully, it was over.
The line-up for the victorious Knights was Salas, Mattias Martinez, Jhonny Sejas, Javier de las Heras, Sergio Palazuelos, Sanchez, David Li Tan, Jose Zhou Zeng, Alvaro Lopez, Pacor, Gamboa, Kevin Pulis, Diego Melgar, Cocciani, and Marlon Castillo.
For the Griffins: Voss, Andres Estenssoro, Alejandro Rios, Jose Bedoya, Nicolas Bedoya, Estenssoro, Harriague, Baldivieso, Rosado, Capobianco, Nostas, Sergio Vargas, Mateo Terrinoni, Martin Rohrman, Christopher Saltzieder, Andred Estatuti, Joaquin Castañeda, and Marco Parada.
First-half goals put Eagles atop Jaguars
The Christian Learning boys varsity soccer team took a 2-0 lead in the first half, and hung on to win 2-1 against Cooperative Thursday in a game played at International.
As the final whistle sounded there was a collective gasp of relief from the assembled multitude, partly over the fact that, at last, there had been a varsity boys soccer match that had not ended in a tie. But it well could have.
The two first-half goals by Christian Learning were exquisite set-piece gems. The first, near the start of the half, was scored on a beautifully co-coordinated header by Danny Caniviri who knifed into the goal area on a Josh Mojica penalty kick.
Mojica figured in the second as well, unleashing a long hard kick that Jaguar goalie Federico Salto, despite his Superman shirt, was only able to fend off, not catch. Power forward Esteban Eguez gathered in the rebound and slipped it deftly past Sauto into the net.
But in between those two goals the Jaguars hammered away, forcing Eagle goalie Alejandro Garcia to make a series of heroic saves. (And if Sauto wants to play “Superman,” that makes Garcia “Plastic Man.”)
Another Cooperative shot bonged softly off the crossbar and bounced out to the side of the goal area. “We’re giving them way too many chances,” an Eagle fan complained aloud to those in his vicinity.
But none of these efforts bore fruit, and the Eagles came off the field at halftime with a 2-0 lead.
And they kept it that way well into the second half, though it was not easy. A Cooperative partisan with a statistical turn of mind counted thirteen shots by the Jaguars in the second half, as opposed to two for the Eagles.
He was not counting routine saves, where the ball got out ahead of the attackers, obliging the goalies to scoop up the ball and dispose of it. Those were about even. He was counting only balls where the attacker, in range of the goal, got off an unimpeded shot.
And while two of the Jaguar shots bounced off some part of the goal posts, most were not saves because they went way high, or way wide.
One shot almost broke a window on the second floor of a classroom building located what had seemed to be a safe distance – thirty meters or so – behind the goal.
To use a military analogy, it was as if the Jaguar forward observers had neglected to radio the coordinates of the goal back to the artillery, and so the Cooperative heavy howitzers were left to fire wildly.
The Eagle defense can claim some credit for this. They were arriving fast, so that the Jaguar attackers had fewer nanoseconds than they might have liked to line up the ball. Also, the Jaguars had learned by then that unless they could really get some torque on the ball goalie Garcia was going to catch it.
But the pressure was building and when Jaguar star Jose Alfredo Abuawad finally beat goalie Garcia to a ball and zipped it along the ground into the right side of the net, it felt as if the air had finally gone out of a very over inflated ball, at least for the moment.
But someone on the Jaguar bench was heard to say, “Too little too late.”
And it was. The game ended a few minutes later on a Jaguar free kick. A kick that went high and wide.
Thus Christian Learning moves on into the championship round next Thursday against Cambridge. Cooperative will battle it out for third-pace with International.
The line-up for the Eagles was Garcia, Tomas Somare, Canaviri, Richard Telchi, Nicolas Smith, Andre Larsen, Trevor Reed, Jeff Stabler, Alex Apodaca, Conroy Janzen, Richard Ling, Mojica, Eguez, Daniel Oh, Mark Salinas, and George Pyung Lim.
For the losing Jaguars: Jonathan Pauker, Francisco Roda, Hyum Kim, Andres Shin, Nicolas Cronenbold, Milan Marinkovic, Abuawad, Jose Manuel Vasquez, Jean Andre Bretel, Esteban Salvatierra, Francisco Sauto, Esteban Sauto, Jorge Rojas (captain), Diego Morales, and Alfonso Roca.
Varalta's second goal was a header on a corner kick by Tania Landivar that Varalta timed exquisitely. The achievement was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that Varalta was about the shortest player on the field. 
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