Vikings' midfield too much for Batavia
By Chris Walker

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Teams don’t talk about winning trophies when they’ve only won twice and the season is more than halfway over, but that will be a point of discussion amongst the Geneva boys’ soccer team heading into Tuesday’s battle against St. Charles East.

Geneva earned the chance of winning that trophy by disposing of Batavia, the current owner of the trophy, 4-1 on Thursday night in an Upstate Eight River Conference game at Burgess Field in Geneva.

The trophy in question is the Fox trophy, awarded each season to the team that fares best in head-to-head competition among Geneva, Batavia, St. Charles East, and St. Charles North.

“We haven’t talked about the Fox trophy yet,” Geneva coach Ryan Estabrook said. “We won it the first two years and Batavia still has it right now. I’m hoping we can win it back and put our names on it again.”

Geneva (2-4-2, 2-1-0) took control early, possessing the ball and creating its fair share of scoring opportunities. Ultimately it led to their first goal when defender Alex Zefron sent a cross to fourth-year varsity player Josh Poythress, who the fed a header to forward Matt Butz. Butz blasted the feed past Batavia keeper Nick Foster.

“Poythress just tapped it and it stopped right in the middle of the box,” Butz said. “I just powered it right in.”

While it certainly wasn’t the most creative goal or most amazing one, and certainly not the type to get a millions hits on YouTube, it was a goal, and that’s something Estabrook has been preaching to his team all season. At times this fall, the Vikings seemingly have been too concerned with how they look when trying to score rather than simply taking a blue-collared, do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-it-in-net approach.

“We’ve been hammering it to them that it doesn’t matter what body part it goes off of or if they have to follow it in,” Estabrook said. “We just want to go until the goalie has it secure and we’ll be disappointed if the ball is bouncing around and we don’t score.”

Apparently the message has been drilled into the Vikings’ craniums enough times that it’s now coming to fruition on the field. Well, at least at Burgess Field.

“Coach has been telling us that it doesn’t matter how it looks, just so it gets into the goal,” Butz said. “Now we’re just trying to win the games and we can win many of them as long as we finish.”

The Vikings extended their lead to 2-0 when Nick Konickek connected from nearly 30-yards away, sending a wormburner past Foster.

Butz tallied his fifth goal on the season to make it 3-0 with less than seven minutes remaining in the opening half. The senior simply outmuscled a Batavia defender to catch up to a long pass from Beck Neberall to earn an opportunity to go one-on-one with Foster.

“I ended up being left open at midfield after bodying him (Batavia defender) out of the way,” Butz said. “I had a bad angle on the first shot, but I was able to get the rebound and play it right in.”

Batavia (2-9-0, 1-4) simply couldn’t counter the Vikings.  It’s been a rough season filled with inconsistent play for the Bulldogs with a lot of inexperienced players still trying to figure out what it takes to play at the varsity level.

“When you get down 3-0 like that, it’s deadly,” Batavia senior forward Billy Lockwood said. “I just don’t think we were feeling it at the beginning of the game. We got a little pep talk at halftime and that got us more into it.” 

One of the roughest spots on the pitch came at midfield, as the Bulldogs came up short on countless occasions in fighting for 50/50s and sustaining possession.

“They’re much bigger and much more physical than us in the middle,” Batavia coach Mark Gianfrancesco said. “That created opportunities for them and they cost us some goals. We lost that battle in not matching their physicalness. I don’t think we’ve played a team this physical, so I think we struggled with that.”

Phelipe Graske proved key in the midfield for the Vikings, disturbing the Batavia midfielders all evening.

“He did a tremendous job on the offensive end of getting forward and creating nice opportunities for us,” Estabrook said. “He sprayed the ball all over the field and anytime we’re able to possess the ball and limit the other team’s opportunities it’s a good thing. We had been doing that a lot before but now we’re creating better opportunities and our drive is stronger.”

Perhaps somewhat overlooked in the contest due to the Geneva offensive explosion was the team’s defensive effort, led by 5-foot-9 Brian Pacilio.

“Brian’s really shored that up for us,” Estabrook said. “He’s physically not where he wants to be, but he’s such a strong leader and everyone feeds off of that. You see a big difference in our lineup when he’s back there.

Poythress gave the Vikings an insurance goal with 29:16 left in the second half. It wouldn’t be needed, although the Bulldogs averted a shutout when sophomore Adam Heinz scored with 9:36 left in the contest.

“We got the one goal but could’ve had two more on throw-ins,” Gianfrancesco said. “But what are you going to do? We didn’t do enough early, either.”

Gianfrancesco has seen his team play better as of late, even if it’s just been sporadic within the 80 minutes of any given match.

“I’m surprised with how we came out, and they took the wind out of our sails right away,” he said. “We still are learning how to come back and I think we saw that in the second half. I’m not naïve, because I know they subbed some guys, but I want to focus on the positives.”

Batavia is getting the effort it needs, but still is trying to overcome spurts of the lackadaisical play that is part of the territory when you’re following a great team that advanced to sectional play and graduated 17 seniors.

“We’ve been playing well the past one-and-a-half to two weeks, but this by far was our worst game,” Gianfrancesco said. “If you would’ve seen us on Tuesday against Larkin, we were playing our best and had them down 3-1 with 20 minutes left before Erik Rodriguez went nuts with two goals and two assists and we lose 4-3 because we’re not consistent enough.”

Whether or not the Bulldogs can put forth a full 80 minutes of soccer this fall remains to be seen.

“For whatever reason we can’t make it for 80 minutes and (Gianfrancesco) talks about it a lot,” Lockwood said. “But we’re starting to see things get better. We’re improving and the juniors that we have this year will be great next year.”

Despite having only two wins, just like the Bulldogs, Geneva appears to be heading in a different direction. The Vikings will have a chance to use its home field advantage again on Saturday when they invite Wheaton Academy to town. It’ll also serve as preparation for the match-up against St. Charles East on Tuesday.

The Vikings will have to leave the comfort of their new turf home and play on terrain that’ll actually leave grass stains on their uniforms.

“We’re definitely excited about that opportunity,” Butz said. “We’ve been working a lot on our shooting and stuff in practice and hopefully we can continue it.”

They’ve also changed formations and inserted different players into the lineup so the Vikings are optimistic that their season is on the upswing.

“At this point the guys now have a certain amount of familiarity with each other,” Estabrook said. “If our squad now played our squad from the beginning of the season it wouldn’t be much of a contest. We’ve improved that much, but when you’re dealing with 16, 17 and 18-year-old boys, on any given day you’re not sure you’ll have you’re best output. But I’ve been pleased with what I’ve seen in practice and what I saw tonight.”

“Now we’ll see what happens against Wheaton Academy on Saturday and then the big match against St. Charles East on Tuesday.”