Foothill barely edge out Trojan’s during a visit
Skyline’s men’s soccer team netted a hard 4-5 loss at home against Foothill College’s Owls Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016.
The game started off in Skyline’s favor as freshman Mohamed Algaradi scored the initial goal during the early stage of the game.
However, the Foothill players started to rack up the goals fairly quickly.
After scoring one goal to tie the game, Foothill began their attack.
Four-goals-straight brought the Owls to a comfortable lead and bring the first half Skyline’s head coach Gabe Saucedo talked about the team’s strategy going in the game.
“We are just to play our game,” Saucedo said after the game. “The strategy was to play out game and dictate the pace of play by moving the ball quickly.”
During the half-time break, coach Saucedo seemed to have made the necessary adjustments as the Trojans began to shoot for more goals. Skyline’s offense started to pay off with close-shave shots at the opponent’s goal.
Field players Algaradi and Roberto Argueta spear-headed Skyline’s offense as the Trojans tied Foothill with three consecutive goals; including one unassisted goal by Algaradi and one from Argueta with an assist from Daniel Segura.
With the offense covered, the Trojan’s Goalkeeper James Brignoli and the rest of the team was on defense, with Brignoli’s three saves. Despite Skyline’s efforts, Foothill came out victorious with a tie-beating goal towards the game’s close.
“We are still upbeat, coming back from a 4-1 down to tie at 4-4,” Saucedo said. “Our team has a lot of heart and we don’t quit. We scored some really nice goals; unfortunately, we couldn’t win today. We gave up that last one for them to go ahead but there is a lot of positive today.”
In spite of all that, the Trojans this season showed promise with their new head coach as well as new talents. Freshman Mohamed Algaradi is definitely someone to keep an eye on after scoring three goals, two of which were unassisted. “It was a good game,” Algaradi said, of the team’s performance. “We worked hard and scored when we were down 4-1. We just need to work hard on our mistakes. We are going to talk to coach about mistakes and it’s not going to happen again.”
“We just got to keep our heads up and think of beating the next opponent,” Argueta said. “We got to work twice as hard as the other team to prove our goals. We just got to work hard and work on our offense.”
There also seemed to be a good amount of questionable calls made by the officials against both teams; one of which was a missed red card call. According to coach Saucedo, the officials shouldn’t be blamed.
The game also resulted in an unfortunate injury to one of the Foothill’s players, Eric Hegmann. Skyline’s next home game will be against College of Marin on Friday, Sept. 16, 2016.