In basketball you can be called for traveling. In soccer … is there such a thing as not traveling?

 

 

By Mitch Silver

In basketball you can be called for traveling. In soccer … is there such a thing as not traveling?

Dobbs Ferry put that question to the test September 22. They had a bus problem on their way to the Hornidge Road campus. Or, rather, a lack-of-bus problem. Theirs didn’t arrive at the Eagles’ campus, and the replacement was only starting out at game time.

“We’ll just have to wait for them,” Coach Brian Iacovelli told us. So, for the next hour, he and fellow Panther mentor Frank Gizzo put their charges through one half-speed drill after another. At 5:30, whatever had clipped the Eagles’ wings had been remedied, and the visitors took the field. And wouldn’t you know, they were the fresher of the two teams, at least at the start.

Beaten 3-1 by the Black Cats earlier in the season, Dobbs made more of a game of it this time around. They found joy up both wings, sending crosses into the Rye Neck box that made the home team have to work hard to clear the danger. On the other end, the Eagles’ 6’3” goalkeeper, Henry Tashman, was gobbling up everything in sight.

Despite Rye Neck’s superior time of possession and a lot of near breakaways, shadows were starting to envelop the field half an hour in when a pushing foul was called on a Dobbs Ferry defender. Up stepped sophomore and leading scorer Luis Galeano, and he buried the free kick from just outside the D into the corner to the right of the keeper.

And that was all she wrote. The Panthers walked off the field at the half leading 1-0, and that’s how they walked off the field, in the gloaming, at game’s end. The win nudged Rye Neck’s season record into positive territory at 4-3-1. And it gave Dobbs Ferry a positive effort to take back on their bus. Fortunately, it was there to take them home.

The Panthers next travel to Irvington September 28 for a tournament involving the hosts, Ardsley and Briarcliff. Then its home September 30 to take on Hastings.