Varsity Girl's Soccer: Middletown and Brunswick re-discover rivalry

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

 

The Middletown High School Varsity Girl’s Soccer team is ready to start the Central Maryland Conference schedule and in doing so look to prove to their opponents’ that sometimes actions speak a lot louder than words.

This hopeful lesson from the Knights and more will provide for a juicy early season contest as the Knights will travel down Route 17 to take on the Brunswick High School Railroaders on Tuesday September 6^th at 7:00 p.m.

Last year’s contest was the first time that the Railroaders and the Knights had played due to the fact that in the old Monocacy Valley Athlletic League, the two teams were in different divisions and barely saw or heard of each other.

In the new Central Maryland Conference, though, the Railroaders and Knights were the opening contest of the season, and as the Knights won 2-1 in overtime there was much more surrounding the game than what the casual fan saw that met the eye.

Multiple reports of on the field verbal disagreements between players in what was a tightly contested game turned into a fight on social media and gave the newly restarted match-up between the two teams some credence and just a little bit of anger behind it.

The reasons for what happened on the field are not as difficult to understand as the question of why the Twitter fight between players from each team ensued. The Railroaders were an upstart program who had consistently played second fiddle to the Knights for a number of years and who had just taken their hated rival to overtime.

The Knights were trying to pick up their first wion of the season and were facing a Brunswick team that played physically and aggressive throughout the contest, which almost surely caused some anger on the Middletown side as no one likes to be slide tackeled and have their legs taken out from under them.

Whatever the reasons were this has created an air of drama around the game as the Knights hit the road to face the Railroaders. The atmosphere and possible anger between the two teams likely won’t be as strong especially considering the fact that some of the main players on-the-field and off-the-field have graduated but there will still be some animosity based on the fact alone that Middletown has been and ,most liely will always be Brunswick’s hated rival.

The Knights will have bigger fish to fry then the remnants of an on the field scuffle last year as the Knights are still looking for a way to shift their offense into maximum overdrive.

Middletown has scored only one goal in their past three games if you count the final scrimmage of the pre-season against Walt Whitman and has seemed at times that they could not manage to break through the defensive looks that opposing teams were giving them.

Tonight would be the perfect night for Middletown to break it as they will be forced to score against a Brunswick team who showed a special stinginess to giving up goals last year, especially in crucial games.

Middletown will have to stay focused on taking advantage of Brunswick’s errors especially if the Railroaders come out playing an emotional, physical style of play which could lead to simple mistakes being made by the Railroaders. Should the contest between Brunswick and Middletown get physical?

Then the new rivalry might be  spiced up even more.