October
24, 2005
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Ramapo keeper Adam Mekkawy making the save on the first shot of the second round of penalty kicks that gave the Green Raiders the advantage they held onto to outlast Cliffside Park in county quarterfinals. |
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OLD TAPPAN -- Soccer is a team game that needs all 11 players working together to make a team successful. That is, of course, unless it is in a penalty kick shootout and one side needs to make just one more kick to eliminate the other. On Sunday in the Bergen County Tournament quarterfinals, Ramapo goalkeeper Adam Mekkawy was in that do-or-die situation and his teammates could do nothing but watch from the sidelines.
After 100 minutes of soccer left the game tied at 1, both Ramapo, the undefeated top seed, and ninth-seeded Cliffside Park were still no closer to finding a winner through the first eight penalty kicks, which all found the back of the net.
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| Jon Yazo and the Cliffside Park attack had some quality chances against the stout Ramapo defense. |
With Ramapo shooting first, Cliffside keeper Jonathan Dominguez guessed correctly with a dive to his right, making the save that put the Red Raiders within one unobstructed shot from the dot from a stunning upset and Mekkawy directly on the hot seat.
“You just basically react to the ball, there is not much else you can do,” said Mekkawy, the senior keeper.”
Mekkawy reacted in time to knock down the potential game-winner then saved Cliffside’s first PK of the second round to give his team an advantage. And after Dominguez had a save nullified by sketchy decision that ruled he did not start on the goal line. Tim Decilveo made good on his second chance to keep Ramapo in front.
“[The referee] told me that my keeper didn’t start on the line. If my keeper didn’t start on the line, then why did he blow the whistle and why didn’t the line judge put his flag up?” asked Cliffside head coach Jim Fucci. “But that’s not the point and I don’t want it to be about that because it sounds like an excuse and Cliffside Park doesn’t make excuses. Give Ramapo the credit, that is a great team over there.”
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| Ramapo's EJ Alvarado flicked home the game's first goal 10 minutes in. |
It all ended when Mekkawy made another save on the next Cliffside shooter to give the Green Raiders a 2-1 (8-6 in PKs) win and a spot in next weekend’s semifinals against No. 4 Paramus, a 3-2 winner over Ridgewood.
“We always do it the same way, the kids pick who wants to go (in the shootout) and they pick their own order,” said Ramapo head coach Evan Baumgarten. “We never work on penalty kicks, but they were confident enough to go out and do it.”
The down side of a penalty kick shootout is that it puts the onus on individual players to pull through in a situation that is foreign to the natural flow of the game of soccer. But it was necessary on Sunday as the game lasted nearly three hours and a winner had to be decided in someway after the teams went at it tooth-and-nail through regulation and two scoreless overtime periods.
Ramapo got the lone goal of the first half and it came inside the first 10 minutes. Jeff Walsh sent a restart into the area where EJ Alvarado got a head to it and flicked it off the near post and in.
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| Ramapo's Jeff Walsh (25) and Cliffside's Steve Percy battling for a 50-50 ball in one of the game's many physical encounters. |
“I personally think that Jeff Walsh has one of the best free kicks around and as soon as he hit that one I knew that it had my name all over it,” said Alvarado, a junior. “I just went to the spot and got it.”
That lead held up well into the second half as Ramapo’s physical defense kept itself between the skilled Cliffside attack and the goal. It looked like Cliffside’s best chance at the equalizer went by the boards when Mekkawy robbed Jon Yazo with 18 minutes left in regulation. Yazo made a dazzling 40-yard run with possession and got to the top of the area before crushing one toward the right side of the net.
Mekkawy made a full dive to his left to knock the ball down and recovered in time to close the distance between himself and the foot of Estachio Fabrizio, which was poised to bury the rebound.
But with 10:15 left, Cliffside’s Hugo Sanchez flopped what looked like a harmless lob into the penalty area. There was a miscommunication in the back as Mekkawy tried to call off his last defender, and the ball squirted free and rolled the last eight yards untouched into the net to tie the game.
Inside the last nine minutes, Ramapo went hard after the potential game-winner and almost got it one more than one occasion. First, there was the ball played out of the back by Blaine Kelivas that Konstantine Tavardze redirected past a rushing Dominguez and toward the open net. But Ralf Augusto, in full sprint, got there just in time to knock it off the line.
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| This shot by Ramapo's Elliott Osafo (left) nearly won the game in the 85th minute before it was headed off the line by Cliffside Park's Erik Estrada (right). |
With five minutes to go, a Ramapo corner kick found the head of Walsh, who played it down to Elliott Osafo, who in turn nearly hit what would have been a spectacular goal. Osafo’s scissors kick was ticketed for the inside of the near post, but Erik Estrada got up for it and headed it off the line to save the tie for Cliffside.
In the first overtime, Osafo got to a through ball by Decilveo and had the keeper in between before his shot clanged off the crossbar of the football uprights looming just above the goal.
“I thought we had a pretty good game. I thought we created a lot of chances and they must have cleared four or five [shots] off the line,” said Baumgarten, who hopes that this is the game that spurs his team, currently No. 1 in the state and No. 16 nationally, on to bigger things. “Hopefully this catapults us from that standpoint. We haven’t gelled yet and hopefully this will do that for us because we needed every kid out there today to get through.”
For Cliffside, it was a crushing loss, and Fucci hopes that his team doesn’t go the other way after coming so close. There were plenty of positives to a game in which the Red Raiders stood one converted penalty kick from advancing to the county semifinals for the second straight year.
“How many times to do you see a big loss like this and then a [season] go down the toilet? We can’t let that happen because we have a good team, we have a good squad. We played with the top team in New Jersey and there is something to be said for that, something has to be said for the character that Cliffside Park has,” said Fucci. “It’s old school Cliffside. When you’re backed into a corner you come out swinging and that is what we have to do from here.”
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