Blackhawks' battle-testing continues vs. Naperville North

 

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By Darryl Mellema

Those people who say there aren’t any easy DuPage Valley Conference boys soccer got to witness a perfect – but soggy – example of just how tough the DVC can be in Tuesday’s Naperville North-West Aurora match.

Visiting Naperville North is undefeated this season and has proved incredibly difficult to break down, allowing 6 goals all season.

And while the Blackhawks were unable to score, the match ended 1-0 and a wide-open second half saw chances at both ends and really could have finished with either team a winner.

“This means a lot because we’re trying to build for the playoffs,” Naperville North goal scorer Joe Sullivan said. “We’re trying to get these quality wins near the end so we get kind of hot going into the playoffs.”

The match-winning goal came from one of the better passing movements of the first half. Kyle Lindberg sent a ball from the center of the field to Evan Trychta on the left wing.

The ball skipped up and Trychta had a little difficulty controlling it. But he then whipped a cross back toward the right post, where Sullivan streaked in to fire home the only goal of the match. The 11th-minute goal, Sullivan’s 10th of the season, stood up the rest of the match.

“I saw (Trychta) going down the left, and I kind of had nobody around me,” Sullivan said. “So I just broke to the goal thinking either he was going to have a shot or pass it. He played a perfect ball.”

Naperville North (15-0-1, 3-0) defended well throughout the match, though Huskies coach Jim Konrad said there were some issues with the manner of how that defense worked.  Matt Vogel, Neil Wiaranowski, Lee Grander and Max Auden made the back four while the team’s central midfielders dropped back as a pair of defensive midfielders.

At times, this created an effective screen in front of Kevin Anderson in the Huskies’ goal. At other times, the gap between those players and the remaining midfielders and the forwards was expansive.

“In the first half, we struggled a bit because they held numbers back and they were doing a really good job of double teaming our forwards and midfield,” Konrad said. “It was tough for our defenders to sort out when do we step or when do we fall off, because there was no one running up top. So our midfield got stretched out.”

The second half, in that respect, went better for the Huskies.

“The boys did a way better job of stepping and taking away their chances early,” Konrad said. “But late in the half, they had a number of chances and (Anderson) came up big. The system with the central midfielders dropping back is not new.

“That’s still a work in progress, even through we’ve been played it for two years now. It’s tricky, when you’re playing against a team that’s defensive-minded, to know how deep do our defensive mids go. So we almost end up playing with six at the back at times, and that’s not what we want to do.”

The movement and passing between Lindberg and Trychta proved to be the biggest threats Naperville North had in the first half, and Sullivan had another strong effort saved by Alex Guillen in the 17th minute. In the last minute of the half, Sullivan threaded a through ball to Lindberg, who shot high.

West Aurora was already playing its part in the match, however. The Blackhawks (11-7, 2-3)  got a free header from Steve Rivera, whose effort went just high at the midpoint of the half.

And as the second half progressed, the hosts got efforts just as the Huskies did. The weather conditions worsened in that second half, when a drizzle became a downpour. But this year, West Aurora is playing on FieldTurf, and so the match never deteriorated into a mudbath as it would have done in 2010 or other past seasons.

So while Lindberg shot just wide with a right-to-left shot in the opening 10 minutes of the second half for Naperville North, West Aurora responded through a dipping James Rink shot on which Anderson had to get down well to cover.

Naperville North tried to catch West Aurora’s defense square with through balls or chipped balls over the top, but the Blackhawks regrouped each time. Trychta had a shot saved with 15 minutes to play but West Aurora broke immediately back and, 3 minutes later, Rivera forced a save from Anderson.

Brink brought Anderson back into action with a shot with 7 minutes to play, but the final key moment came with 5:07 left, when a West Aurora player was called for deliberate handling in the penalty area.

Trychta took the penalty kick and Guillen saved. The rebound came straight to Trychta, and Guillen pulled off a second save before the ball was cleared.

“I knew he was nervous,” Guillen said. “The shot was within my reach – a little more to the right and it probably would have went in. The second shot was all luck. I was getting up, saw that he shot and I put my foot up, and it was right there.”

Guillen was among the chorus of Blackhawks players and coaches who felt the home team stepped up to the challenge of playing the top team in the DVC and one of the top teams in the state at this point of the season.

“I’m really happy with how we played,” Guillen said. “That goal of theirs, those happen. Whoever makes the first mistake in games like this is likely to lose.”

Blackhawks coach Joe Sustersic was also very quick to mention how well he thought his team had played.

“That was our best game of the year – by far,” Sustersic said. “I think we played the system the way that we wanted. We made one mental mistake, where we wanted to drop back and double-team their guys. One guy chose not to, and we let them turn and cross and double-teams become one-one-ones and they scored the goal.”

Sustersic acknowledged the talent Naperville North brought to Zimmerman Field, but he also felt his team showed that it has weapons too.

“We played well,” Sustersic said. “We don’t have the same guns as they do. But you play a team of that caliber and that ability, to restrict them the way we did, is good.”

One of the keys in the second half came as Matt Koth moved from a defensive role toward the attack. Koth was injured in West Aurora’s loss to Oswego East and is just returning to the lineup.

“(Koth) comes up there and things change right off the bat,” Sustersic said. “Even though he’s a defender, Matt Koth is the difference up front. When we have a healthy Matt Koth, we’re a different team.”

West Aurora is unlikely to get a top-half seed when sectional pairings are announced. That doesn’t mean the Blackhawks are going to be a team to take likely in the postseason.

“In the World Cup, there is always a Group of Death,” Sustersic said. “Our sectional is like a Group of Death. We might finish with an 11 seed. We’re closer to the bottom than we are to the top. But we have to get ourselves ready. Can we play with teams? Yeah. No. 1 might be (Naperville) North, which was a 1-0 loss; we played the 2-seed, which is probably what Batavia will be, to a 2-1 loss and we lost to Naperville Central 2-1 in overtime. Even though it may be the Sectional of Death, we’re not going to back down from anybody.”