Witches blank Indians> Young scores winning goal

BREWER – In a battle of the winless, aggressiveness won out.

The Witches shut down every breakaway, intercepted passes up the middle, and outshot the Old Town Indians for a 1-0 schoolgirl soccer win at Pendleton Street field Monday afternoon. Brewer is now 1-2 and Old Town is 0-3.

Brewer wing Rachel Young popped a Kristen Frey feed over Indian goalie Kendra Brown’s head and into the goal’s left corner at the 17:56 mark in the second half, ending an hour of scoreless Brewer-dominated play.

“We’re not playing the way we should be, we’re not playing the way we were in preseason and I don’t know what’s gotten into our game,” said a dejected Bill Meehan, Old Town’s coach.

“It seems to be a factor of people making inappropriate decisions and not settling the ball down, and not playing to the strength of our game, which is the width of the field,” he added. “Obviously when we do that, we’re fine, but when we don’t do that, we’re in big trouble. And we got into big trouble too many times today.”

Brewer controlled the ball, possessing it through most of the game, and quickly regaining it when Old Town went to its erratic air game.

Old Town defenders consistently attempted to clear the ball out from their goal area by kicking the ball up the center of the field and directly at Brewer’s halfback and midfield lines.

That alone contributed to Brewer’s 21 shots on goal, 17 more than the Indians could muster in 80 minutes. Brewer took an additional 15 shots toward the goal area, compared to Old Town’s 10 attempts to make a play at the cage.

The Indians’ wings were forced to come to the middle of the field numerous times to track down intercepted passes, taking away the obvious target when Old Town regained ball possession.

On the other side of the ball, Brewer’s defenders anticipated passes before they materialized and cut them off, outrunning the pursuing Indians.

“I thought we had a great passing game, I thought we passed the ball superbly from the 18 to the 18,” Brewer coach Mark Savage said. “I thought we stepped in front of a lot of balls and we were more aggressive to the ball.”

Brewer goalie Heather Hogan did not have to make a save on any of Old Town’s four shots, while Brown made three saves on 21 Witch shots.

“We’ve been working a lot on the wall pass, the basic give-and-go and I think we’re seeing some of that now,” Savage said. “Now, we need to go beyond that to the next step, but in preseason we weren’t seeing that at all.”