East Hampton Boys Soccer Scores Six Unanswered Second Half Goals to Defeat Host Westhampton Beach, Clinch League IV Title

After giving up a pair of goals in the game’s first five minutes at Westhampton Beach on Saturday, it looked as if the East Hampton boys soccer team was going wrap up the regular season and head into the postseason with a loss.

The Bonackers, however, proved in the second half just how dominant a team they can be by scoring six unanswered goals to come back and win, 6-2, finishing the season with a 9-1 League IV record (11-2 overall) and with it the league title. While East Hampton has been a perennial playoff team regularly over the past the decade or so, this is the team’s first league title since 2014.

“We have the ability to” be dominant, Bonac head coach Don McGovern said after the game. “Going into the playoffs, we have to do it for 80 minutes. I haven’t said this to them yet because I don’t want to ruin the moment, it’s a big achievement, securing the league title, but you don’t want to lose going into the playoffs. It’s really not something you want.”

Westhampton Beach, which clinched a playoff spot last week with a 2-1 win over Comsewogue on October 6, opened the scoring 32 seconds into the game when senior co-captain Ethan Vogt intercepted a poor clearing by East Hampton in the box and scored on a wide open net to make it 1-0. Five minutes later, Westhampton Beach senior co-captain Kade Murphree ran and leaped through a ball at midfield, outran the East Hampton defense to take possession of the ball, brought it all the way down the field and crossed it to Vogt in the middle, who buried the goal, and the Hurricanes were quickly out in front, 2-0.

From that point forward, East Hampton controlled much of the tempo of the game and had a number of scoring chances, but to the Hurricanes’ credit, many of the Bonackers’ shots were either blocked by a line of defenders or senior goalie Alex Ajiataz was able to save it or snuff out a would-be opportunity.

East Hampton didn’t get its first goal on the scoreboard until just over six minutes into the second half, when junior Gary Gutama scored to make it a one-goal game, 2-1. About 10 minutes later, senior Bonacker Jose Calderone sent the ball into the box that Ajiataz came out to play, but he missed. Senior co-captain Eric Armijos, one of the top goal scorers in the county entering Saturday with 13 goals, settled the ball quickly at his feet and shot and scored to tie the game at 2-2. Then, just two minutes later, Armijos sent a ground ball in from about 20 yards out, and Ajiataz, possibly from being screened, barely moved, as the ball went into the bottom left corner to give East Hampton the 3-2 lead.

“I just feel like we were sleeping in the first half,” Gutama said after the game. “We weren’t playing our game. We had a completely different mindset in the second half. From the beginning of the game, we knew we wanted it — we just needed to prove it and at halftime we just needed to outwork the other team. Just be woke, play our game and give it our all and put everything out on the field.

“We were just getting outworked, to be honest with you,” Armijos added. “It was just they wanted it more, it seemed like they wanted it more. We were asleep, and I guess at halftime we had this talk how we can’t let that happen. We can’t let the team get the best of us, can’t let them outwork us, and that shouldn’t ever happen again.”

Both coaches and players talked about how a different strategy was implemented in the second half that helped turn things around.

“We had to push more players up,” Armijos said. “So that’s what we did. And we played much faster in the back. Because in the first half, we were definitely way too sloppy in the back, which led to the first two goals, especially that first one in the first 30 seconds of the game. That came from a mistake in the back, not playing it out, so we just one-two touch in the back. You could see it worked.”

With 6:07 remaining in the game, Gutama added his second goal of the game to give the Bonackers the all important insurance goal. For good measure, junior Christopher Guallpa went top shelf with 2:33 remaining, then senior Michael Figueroa added one more 30 seconds later to create the final score.

“As you could see, even though we went down 2-0, we still kept trying to play the way we would like to play and we did generate some opportunities,” McGovern said. “Their defense was tough. We weren’t getting enough numbers into the attacking third to be more than individualistically dangerous, so we talked about how we have to attack with numbers. That’s what makes us successful, or any team successful. And I think that the boys heeded that message from us. They knew it, too. They could have just tried to play the same way, we weren’t going to get through. A lot of credit to them. They battled for everything, there was no quit. They came back and kept working to get more goals.”

After a strong first half, Westhampton Beach head coach Cody Hoyt liked the way his team was playing. But a 2-0 lead in soccer, he said, is about the most dangerous lead to have, especially against such a strong team like East Hampton, and it proved that way.

“I think it was a mindset thing,” he said after the game. “They’re obviously a team that, year in and year out, are at the top of things, so they never count themselves out. We had guys go down who we had to take out for a while, so that hurt us a little bit, guys coming in cold off the bench.

“I think, overall, we need to stay positive, knowing that we can play with the No. 1 team in the league with one game left to go to playoffs that we should be able to hang with them. We’ll use this as a learning lesson … it’s not a 40-minute game, it’s an 80-minute game. We got hit with a lot of adversity and I don’t think we responded to that well. With one goal, or even the second goal, I don’t think our attitude and our expressions after that really helped us, so that’s another thing we’re going to have to work on in the short time that we have.”

The ’Canes (5-4 League IV, 5-8-1 overall) finished their regular season Tuesday at Eastport-South Manor. A win there could help them gain a higher seed in the Suffolk County Class A playoffs, which are expected to start with opening round play this Monday, October 24.

East Hampton, with the League IV title in hand, should be the second seed in the bracket, with undefeated and League III Champion Amityville gaining the top seed. The top four teams are all expected to get first round byes and then host quarterfinal games on October 27.

For up-to-date brackets, go to sectionxi.org.