Monument Boys Blank Wahconah
DALTON, Mass. -- The Monument Mountain boys soccer team came out of half-time on Thursday night with a 1-0 lead and a chip on its shoulder.
The Spartans needed just 1 minute, 29 seconds of the second half to double their lead en route to a 3-0 victory under the lights at Wahconah.
“We’ve put ourselves in a hole in a few games, where start games really strong, really out-possess teams, get really quality looks for the first 15 or 20 minutes and then one or two small things don’t go our way and we collapse,” Monument coach Matt Naventi said. “So we talked about putting games away, recently.
“We created a couple of really good looks in the first half [tonight], and we told them: You could have a two- or three-goal lead and have the game opened up at this point, but you don’t. You’ve got to find a mentality to stick one in early, and that was the goal: to score a goal in the first 10 minutes and make them chase the game from there.
“Two minutes in, they got one.”
Senior Matt Amstead, who opened the scoring with a penalty kick in the 35th minute, opened the scoring in the second half when he scored in traffic following a free kick from the right wing to make it 2-0.
It was the only time all night that Monument (2-3) scored on a restart despite earning a 9-1 advantage in corner kicks and a couple of free kicks from just outside the Wahconah 18.
“We’ve been working on set pieces and trying to get a goal off them, put it in the back of the net,” Amstead said. “If we receive the opportunity, if we have the ball stopped, we can put all the pressure up and just be ready to put it in.”
The third Spartans goal came out of the run of play. Noel Powell received a through ball from Wilson Sprague on the right side and finished the run by beating Wahconah’s Anthony Dondiego (four saves) to make it 3-0 in the 76th minute.
Garrett Happ made two stops to earn the shutout win for Monument, which travels to Hoosac Valley next week.
Wahconah (0-4) travels to Drury on Tuesday.