Friday,
October 9, 2015
By Cory K. Doviak
NJS.com Editorial Director
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Angelo Romano scored one of Cliffside Park's five second half goals in a 7-3 win over Lyndhurst in the opening round of the Bergen County Tournament on Thursday. |
CLIFFSIDE PARK – For a team like Cliffside Park, which had scored only 10 goals through its first eight games of the season, the opening seconds of Thursday’s Bergen County Tournament play-in match could have been disastrous. Right off the opening whistle, Lyndhurst gained control of the ball, sent Vincent Ditonto up the wing and pulled the goalie off his line. A centering pass from Ditonto, a spin and shot by Luis Yolianes into an open net and a lead for the visiting Bears just 18 seconds into the game.
It seemed like the dream start for the underdog road team and a nightmare for Cliffside, which was playing in front of a good size crowd on the brand new turf that is its home field. But that is not how the respective coaches, both Cliffside Park HS graduates by the way, saw it.
“Honestly, I think it was better that they scored so early because then our kids had nothing to do but go forward. We had no choice but to put the ball into the back of the net to get back in the game,” said Cliffside head coach Ozgur Oyaroglu. “Nobody wants to be down 1-0 that early, but it could also work in your favor because then all you can do is pressure, pressure, pressure.”
Meanwhile, there was no prolonged celebration on the Lyndhurst sideline where taking the lead was welcome, but the prospect of defending it for the next 79:42 was not all that enticing a prospect.
“Against a team like that, getting an early lead is nice but, chances are, it is not going to hold up,” said Lyndhurst head coach Denis Jelcic. “We’ve seen this team play, we know the championship experience they have around here and they know how to win. It could have been 3-0 us, but 80 minutes is a long time to try to hold this team down.”
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Luis Yolianes scored just 18 seconds into the game to give Lyndhurst the ultra early 1-0 advantage. |
Jelcic certainly knew from what he spoke as, after taking two one-goal leads in the first half, Cliffside put on a clinic after the break. The Red Raiders scored twice in a two-minute span early in the second half and twice more in quick succession in the middle of it on the way to a 7-3 victory.
The final score does not actually do justice to the back-and-forth nature of the game for the first 47 minutes, but the deserving side is going through as Cliffside Park advances to the Round of 16 where it will play second-seed Bergen Tech on Sunday at Emerson High School.
The teams traded first half goals with Cliffside’s Mario Taglic cancelling Yolianes’ opener and then Kevin Campos scoring to retie the score after Ditonto had given Lyndhurst a 2-1 lead with a free header off Andrew Cosman’s corner kick.
It was after the intermission that Cliffside really began to press its advantages. The Raiders had a deeper bench, which allowed them to keep a quicker pace, and they moved the ball with precision, which forced the tiring Golden Bears to do a lot of chasing. When Cliffside is playing well, the ball rarely gets above knee height as it one and two-touches the ball all over the park. And in the second half, Cliffside was playing well.
The Raiders took the lead for good when Taglic pressured up the left and forced a corner kick that Osmar Ruano converted. Ruano skipped the middle man and hit the restart directly inside the second post for a 3-2 Cliffside advantage in the 48th minute. A minute-and-a-half later, Jeyson Urquia got free up the right and made it 4-2.
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Lyndhurst sophomore Vincent Ditonto scored a goal and assisted on another. |
“I was really trying to service it to one of my teammates. I wasn’t aiming for the goal,” said Ruano, a senior captain speaking of the corner kick that went in clean. “Some parts of this season for us have been a little shaky, but we can’t keep our heads down. As captains we have to motivate our teammates to keep going. I honestly believe that we have a good team, we have some confidence now after this game and I think we can go [into the Bergen Tech game] and give them a good fight.”
Thursday’s fight was pretty much stopped after Urquia struck again. One of the few long balls that Cliffside played up on purpose wound up taking a high bounce right on the edge of the area. Like three fielders converging on a pop fly in baseball, the situation called out for someone to take command and it was Urquia who did it. Between the goalie caught in the middle and a defender with his back turned, Urquia poked the ball through into the open net to make it 5-2.
Angelo Romano buried a penalty kick in the 66th minute to make it 6-2 and Urquia completed a second half hat trick with a rip five minutes before time.
Lyndhurst fell to 8-2-1 with the loss, but has a good nucleus of young players that will have a chance to get back to the county tournament next year. This season is not over yet, either, as the Bears are fighting for a league title and could make a deep state sectional tournament run.
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Mario Taglic scored the first goal for Cliffside, which will play Bergen Tech in the Round of 16. |
“We knew coming in that this was not going to be an easy week. We had a loss against New Milford [on Wednesday] that should not have happened, but maybe we were looking past them a little bit to today’s game,” said Jelcic. “We have Harrison on Tuesday, which is a soccer machine down by us, and we have to rise to the occasion. There is a lot of work to be done, but we are capable if we focus and get better.”
Cliffside is getting better as the season trudges along. The Raiders went from having scored 10 goals though eight games to having scored 17 in 11. It had to be figure that the numbers would even out eventually and this might just be the start of another deep county tournament push for a program accustomed to making them.
“As seniors we want to leave here knowing that we left something behind that the program can be proud of,” said defender Jamie Banegas. “Over my years here I have been shown by my coaches and my old teammates how to play and succeed and I just want to do my part to show these underclassmen how it should be. This is a big win and scoring seven goals shows us that we can do it and motivates us to go out and try to do it again.”
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