YARMOUTH — Max Coury scored his fourth goal of the season less than six minutes into the second half to propel unbeaten Yarmouth to a 1-0 win over York in a Western Maine Conference boys’ soccer game Tuesday night.
The two teams are ranked one-two in the Class B South Heal point standings, and it was the Clippers’ second win of the season over the Wildcats. On Sept. 12, Yarmouth (8-0) handed York its only other loss this season with a 3-2 win at York.
“We play some real good teams, but (York) is the real deal,” said Coury, who finished a series of passes on a counterattack by sending a shot from the 6-yard line inside the left post after receiving a feed from Jack Jones. “They do everything fast and they make you make mistakes … For the whole team, it makes us better.”
In the end, it was Yarmouth’s depth that was the difference.
“(Yarmouth is) a very deep team,” York Coach Eric Martens said. “When they’re sending subs on they’re getting better if anything, so it was tough on my guys to defend as long as we did tonight … I have great players on my side, but I think it was tired legs tonight, a little fatigue and that’s part of soccer.”
Each team got off 13 shots, but most of the Wildcats’ shots came from outside the penalty area.
“I thought our back line did a nice job of coming forward against some fast forwards,” said Yarmouth Coach Mike Hagerty, crediting backs Silas Chappell, John D’Appolonia and Aiden Hickey with blunting York’s offense. “We really didn’t have (their strikers) get behind us too often.”
With about 10 minutes left to play, D’Appolonia hustled back to deflect the ball over the end line to the left of the goal after the speedy Alex Nickerson beat goalie Cal Owen to a through ball to the left of the goal and sent a shot toward the wide-open goal line.
Most of the scoring opportunities for York (7-2) came on set pieces.
“We gave them some poor fouls, and I think part of it was us being out of position before the ball was played,” Haggerty said.
Owen made six saves to post his fifth shutout of the season.
“We could never really get enough numbers up there to really create the attack we wanted tonight,” Martens said. “We possessed the ball pretty well at moments and then we had cheap giveaways as well.”
York goalie Alex Neilson, a freshman filling for the injured Brett Smith, came up big on several occasions. He made nine saves in his second start since Smith suffered a broken left wrist while warming up for a game at Gray-New Gloucester last Saturday.
“He’s played forward for me all year,” Martens said. “He’s scored goals and he’s been good up there. As far as depth goes, we lost something, but he did a heckuva job in the net. He kept us in the game.
“We’re going to be better for this (game). We saw things we needed to work on, and we’re happy about that.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Comments are no longer available on this story