Hornets drop second one-goal decision to Mustangs

 

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By Matt Le Cren

Morton and Hinsdale South have identified a key problem in their respective drives for success this season.

Morton has a tendency to take its foot off the accelerator too soon while Hinsdale South often waits until it is too late to put pedal to the metal.

Both trends continued Thursday when the two sides met in West Suburban Conference Gold Division action. Host Morton utterly dominated the possession and outshot the Hornets 22-4 before holding on for a 2-1 victory in Berwyn.

“Our focus in the final third is poor at best,” Morton coach Mike Caruso said. “We let way too many golden chances go to knock teams out early.

“No offense to [the Hornets] - they hustled - but we kept them in the game. That’s the way it’s been the last three games. It’s been 2-0, 2-0, 2-0 and instead of getting the knockout blow to get them out of the game, we give teams hope and eventually it’s going to come back to bite us. It almost came back here.”

Fortunately for the Mustangs (12-2, 3-0) they have players like Alonso Torres, who have been doing more than enough to give Morton an early lead.

Torres scored both goals against the Hornets, giving him eight on the year, showcasing starkly different finishing techniques.

The first goal came at the 26:04 mark of the first half when Jesus Morales carried the ball over midfield and sent a long pass up the right flank to Torres, who quickly cut inside past a defender and rolled a left-footed shot under the arm of Hinsdale South goalie Paras Patel to open the scoring.

Torres’ second strike was even more significant, coming as it did with 1:17 left in the first half. The Mustangs had made the Hornets chase the ball for nearly the entire half and held an 8-1 edge in shots, but it appeared Hinsdale South (2-7-2, 1-3) would get to intermission down just 1-0.

Instead, senior midfielder Elias Salgado sent a long diagonal ball from the left side of midfield over the head of a Hornet defender to Torres on the right side of the penalty area. Torres ripped a 12-yard shot from a sharp angle that Patel had no chance of stopping.

“My teammate, Elias Salgado, gave me a center,” Torres said. “I put a little body on the defender. I just got the ball and I took the shot.

“Our center midfielders controlled the midfield very good and they just delivered to the outside mids and we just touched it [forward].”

“He’s scored a bunch of goals like that for us when he gets down there,” Caruso said. “That’s why we try to move him around a little bit from forward to outside mid just to give him some different angles out there because he is dangerous around the goal.”

The Mustangs continued to be dangerous in the second half, peppering Patel with 14 additional shots. But the Hornet keeper made five of his nine saves after the break and Morton had three sharp-angled shots miss wide and a boatload of other chances fail to pay off.

“Too many bone-headed plays in the final third when we need to do better with the ball,” Caruso noted. “Instead…we either panic and take a bad shot, or when we should shoot, we make a bad pass.”

Part of that might have been the Mustangs feeling confident the Hornets couldn’t make a comeback.

“We wanted to extend the lead but we never thought we were going to lose the game,” Torres said.

Hinsdale South’s only shot of the first half was a dribbler in front that Morton goalie Miguel Chacon went down to stop.

In the second half, South's Jeremy Leganski got his head on a long free kick by Giancarlo Cianelli, forcing Chacon to jump to make the save.

Chacon later punched out a Cianelli free kick with 7:30 remaining. Adam Garcia ran onto the ball at the top of the box but fired over the crossbar.

But the Mustangs’ bid for their fourth shutout was spoiled when the Hornets’ T.J. Kubiesa was taken down in the box with 1:16 left. Kubiesa, Hinsdale South’s leading scorer, converted the penalty kick to make things interesting.

Hinsdale South coach James VanDenburgh, whose club lost to Morton 3-2 in the Red Devil Cup on Aug. 25, was pleased with the way the visitors finished the game.

“That’s what we talked about at halftime – Morton’s a good team and sometimes it’s easy to fall into that [mindset of] it’s LT, it’s Morton,” VanDenburgh said. “Any game on the schedule is going to be tough but I felt like we were reacting a lot the first half. We were chasing it.

“Second half we wanted to regroup and just say this is a 40-minute game now, let’s beat them the second half. You know what, to their credit they hung in there and got one in so it’s a victory inside of a loss."           

Of course, VanDenburgh would rather have losses inside of victories, so he wants to see some more urgency early in games.

“They waited until the last 10 minutes to really turn it on, I thought, and it shouldn’t take us until the final 10 minutes to get the game plan going and be all-in, so to speak,” he said. “But I give my guys credit and Morton all the credit in the world. I tell my guys that every time we play Morton we’re a better team after it and that’s true today.”

One area the Hornets were better at than in recent outings was defense. Despite being under nearly constant pressure, the back line and Patel held a ranked opponent to two goals after giving up 14 over the last three matches.

“That’s also something we’ve been focusing on,” VanDenburgh said. “The past 3-4 games has not been a good average in terms of goals against and goals for, but that’s something we have to continue to work on. There’s some young guys back there but by this point those five-goal games have to be over and done with. I hope they have that out of their system and hopefully they keep working hard.”

That would allow Patel to lower his goals-against average, which doesn’t reflect how well he’s played.

“He’s solid a lot,” VanDenburgh said. “Almost all the time he’s on. He keeps us in games and that was true today.”

The victory kept Morton in a tie for the WSC Gold lead with Leyden (7-2-3, 2-0), which visits Berwyn on Tuesday in a battle for sole possession of first place. The Eagles beat Hinsdale South 5-3 last week.

“We’ve got them at home but they play hard and our intensity needs to get up for the full 80 minutes instead of  in spurts and that’s kind of what we’ve been doing lately, just in spurts,” Caruso said. “It won’t be enough to get by Tuesday so we’ll see if we can tune it up.”