Lower Moreland rolls by Upper Moreland
LOWER MORELAND >> Over the course of the next six days, the Lower Moreland boys soccer team will play three key Bicentennial Athletic League games. The task at hand Monday was a non-league match up with Upper Moreland.
Lower Moreland used a hot start and solid play from its forwards to ease by the Golden Bears 4-1.
The Lions got on the board right away as Tim Fossile followed up a Derek Mitchell shot to give Lower Moreland a 1-0 lead just over two minutes into the game.
Mike Matweizyzk scored a few minutes later in similar fashion to Fossile as Matweizyzk followed up a rebound shot by Bryce Horn.
“That’s one of the things we worked on in practice last week,” said Lower Moreland coach Matt Crouch of the Lions cleaning up rebound shots. “We had a lot of missed opportunities in those games that we kind of blew the last few weeks. One of our key points was to kind of work on that second ball that follow up.”
One of the reasons the Lions got out quick start was they were able to operate in time and space, particularly in the midfield against the Upper Moreland defense. To Lower Moreland’s credit, it created space by using its team speed.
“They came at us real fast and hard and we just weren’t ready for it in the beginning of the game,” Upper Moreland coach Tyler Kleinert said. “We started to pick it up a little bit in the second half.
Upper Moreland started to take a more aggressive approach in the second half. Defensively, the Bears played tighter defense, not giving the Lions as much space to operate and offensively, Upper Moreland showed a willingness to take more of a variety of shots, firing 11 second-half shots towards the Lower Moreland cage. The Golden Bears had only five in the first half.
Upper Moreland finally broke through on the scoresheet in the second half as Matthew Brunner, assisted from Jack Moran, scored late in the contest
“In the first half for some reason we only wanted to shoot inside the 18,” Kleinert said. “Halftime came, I told the forwards ‘shoot from anywhere’ they all have strong feet on this team, they all can shoot from anywhere, so we took that one cross, got a head on it and scored.”
Although Crouch is happy with his team’s win, he knows he can get some more out of them and they are going to need it with a couple of challenging league games against Holy Ghost Prep and New Hope-Solebury upcoming.
“I told the guys today there was another gear that we have and we didn’t need to use it today but tomorrow we’re going to need to use it,” Crouch said.
