Boy's Soccer: Knights smash Linganore; win Sheffler-Ford

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

                         

MIDDLETOWN-For the Middletown High School Varsity Boy’s Soccer team to win the 2016 Sheffler-Ford Tournament they weren’t going to need a super explosive performance. Already leading the tournament standings by five points all the Knights needed to do was make sure that they won the contest and didn’t give up a large amount of goals and the title would’ve been all for them.

Middletown took a slightly different route, one that was much more fun and exciting than the other one as they would run up and down the Linganore High School Lancers using a Josh Woozley hat-trick to power themselves to a 4-0 win over the Lancers and the Sheffler-Ford Tournament title.

The Knights would come out on top of the Lancers straight from the jump as the aggressive, offensive gameplan that the Knights had used in their first game against Governor Thomas Johnson came out to play early as the Knights would already have a lead before halftime.

Woozley would pick up goal #1 for the Knights early in the match as he would put his head into a corner by Luke Ahalt and give the Knights a 1-0 almost from the jump.

That wouldn’t be all from Woozley though as he would score another one with 11 minutes remaining in the first half, to give the Knights a 2-0 lead but there was still the hat trick problem to solve and right before the half, Woozley would take care of that pocketing his third of the game, to give the Knights a 3-0 lead at the break.

For Woozley, it was an outstanding day as with the loss of former Knight Clay Smith to Graduation and Hood College, Middletown will need Woozley to step up more which is something that he’s shown to be very comfortable with scoring five goals in the past two games.

On top of that the offense for Middletown as a whole has not looked much better than it has at this moment, especially during last season when Middletown made their run to a state championship.

During the title run last year the Knights averaged 2.37 goals per game and only scored two goals during the Sheffler-Ford Tournament last year with most of the Knights high goal total coming from games against lower-level county opponents such as Catoctin and Brunswick.

More importantly for the Knights, these two big wins came against two county and Central Maryland Conference opponents who the Knights will see again this year, and will look to finish ahead in order to make the Central Maryland Conference Championship game.

Middletown senior Evan Joseph would score the fourth goal for the Knights’ in the second half finishing off the win and leaving only but time separating them and a title.

It was a powerful offense that helped the Knights clinch championship #1 in the Sheffler-Ford Tournament and that same offense is what the Knights help will hope them to three more before the season is over.