Gallery by Tina Laney
Beckley – It took five minutes for Oak Hill to see its season slip away.
Top-seeded Beckley pulled away from Oak Hill late Tuesday evening, downing the Red Devils 4-0 in the Class AAA Region 3 Section 2 opener at the Paul Cline Memorial Youth Sports Complex.
The win sets up a sectional championship matchup with Greenbrier East, which beat Princeton 2-0, on Thursday in Beckley.
Trailing 1-0 in the 60th minute, the Red Devils’ best scoring look of the night was snuffed by Beckley keeper Bryson Doss in a one-on-one situation. Over the following four minutes the Flying Eagles ended their dance with danger, receiving goals from Ayden Stafford (62nd minute) and Ali Farghaly (64th minute) to quell the upset bid and return to the sectional title game.
“We were having some problems connecting on passes and organizing some things,” Beckley head coach Steve Laraba said. “One of the good things about this team is that we have a bench and I feel like I have players that can change the game, that come off the bench. And I stress to the bench players that when their number’s called, they need to be ready and go on and make a difference. And they did. I mean they went in with some new energy and a little bit of fight, and then Ayden Stafford hit a great shot. It was a great goal.”
Oak Hill head coach Blake Wingrove deemed the missed opportunity as the turning point as well.
“That would have put it 1-1,” Wingrove said. “And I think a momentum shift would have just continued to roll on. It’s tough, you know, moving the ball that fast down there on the on that side of the field, finding that finish, but at the end of the day, they all played with great heart, so that’s all I can ask for.”
Strategically the Red Devils fared well early.
After dropping the regular season matchup 7-0, trailing 3-0 at the half of that game in Oak Hill, the Red Devils were stout on Tuesday, denying the Flying Eagles clean looks. Though the hosts did capitalize on one early courtesy of junior Coby Dillon who scored in the 12th minute to establish a 1-0 advantage.
But the Red Devils effectively neutralized one of the Flying Eagles’ best strategic weapons, the corner kick.
On the night the Flying Eagles went 1-for-8 on corner kicks, scoring on their last attempt in the 77th minute.
“We had a 60 minute session specifically on defending corners, simply because we knew that after they beat (George Washington),” Wingorve saids. “And if I’m not mistaken, it was off of two free set kicks that that they’re lethal on. I mean, they just, they have guys that’ll go up and get it. I have a couple guys that will do the same so I kind of let them roam free. Instead of man marking in the box, I let them float, and I tell them just go up and get the ball that’s all we can do right. Keep it in front of us.”
“They did a good job of finding marks and tracking marks and having a body there with us and we were challenging them,” Laraba said. “I think, early on the season teams just really weren’t thinking that we’d be dangerous on set pieces. And so it was, well, you know, ‘I’ve got that guy,’ but I think they did an excellent job of really focusing on finding a man and tracking him, and if they weren’t winning the header they at least had a body on our guy who was trying to win. It would just knock you off bounce a little bit. But that’s what you’re supposed to do on corner kicks. But Hagen (Hall) found the free space on the last one, so it was good.”
Laraba, who’s seen his teams play postseason spoiler over the last half decade, never thought his team faltered as Oak Hill applied the pressure. Instead his squad, which starts three sophomores, rallied when the contest tightened up.
“They’re very good players, but it’s still a different feeling in the postseason,” Laraba said. “There’s a different environment to it all. And I thought for the most part, they handled it pretty well. We knew Oak Hill was going to come up with a lot of energy. We knew, we definitely knew that it wasn’t going to be the same thing as the regular season game, and that they were going to have a plan. There were times where there they had 10 players in the defensive third of the field, and I understand it, I’ve done that before, and I totally get it.
“But I think I need to give a little bit of credit to our second team, because we worked on that in training and talked to them about what we needed them to do and how we needed them to play. And for 30 minutes we went against our second team, and something very similar to that, and it prepared us. It wasn’t something that we hadn’t seen. I think that was a big part of being able to handle the change in philosophy and formation that Oak Hill had for tonight.”
The Section 2 championship will start at 7 p.m. on Thursday.
