Griffins Unbeaten In Last 10 – Hold On For Season Sweep Over Marquette
The Griffins now have 12 shutouts on the season.
GLEN CARBON – The Father McGivney Catholic High School boys soccer program continued its run of good form, narrowly taking down Gateway Metro Conference rivals Marquette Catholic by a score of 1-0 Monday evening.
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The Griffins have now gone 10 games unbeaten, outscoring their opponents 21-1. In nine of those games, including a 0-0 tie against Mascoutah and a 1-0 win via forfeit over Metro-East Lutheran, McGivney has held its opposition scoreless.
The Explorers took it to McGivney in the opening 15 minutes, making sure goalkeeper Patrick Gierer was on his ‘A’-game. He was tested twice within the first four minutes and finished the game with 10 saves.
After not much action in the offensive third, McGivney scored on basically its first chance. That came in the 19th minute when Lucas Roedl assisted Will Rakers. It was his team-leading 13th goal of the season and Roedl’s second assist.
From there, McGivney held tough for a little over an hour as Marquette had chance after chance in the second half.
“That’s just getting a result,” McGivney head coach Brett Schubert said. “Marquette is a really good team this year. It was important for us to get that early one there, because they were pressing. It was just a matter of us enduring that.”
In the game’s final half hour, the Explorers threw everything and the kitchen sink at Gierer and the McGivney defense. Many of those chances came from Cameron Golike and Eli Baggio.
It seemed Marquette surely found an equalizer in the 55th minute when Golike stayed onside and was in alone on the keeper. Gierer rushed out and Golike nearly chipped him, but the ball went just over the crossbar.
The game also had a hectic ending thanks to a last-minute free kick. A foul right outside the 18-yard box set up a set-piece opportunity well inside Baggio’s range. But with time ticking down, the shot attempt was blocked out for a corner by the wall. The corner kick was taken quickly, but McGivney’s defense cleared it as the final whistle blew.
“Awesome team effort,” Schubert said. “That last 20 minutes was definitely a grind.”
“There were opportunities out there, you’ve just got to make the play,” Marquette head coach Brian Hoener said. “As hard as we’re trying, sometimes the ball just doesn’t bounce your way. It’s not from a lack of effort, it’s just from not being able to execute.”
Marquette came into Monday’s game having won five of its last six. The Explorers fall to 11-5 and 3-4 in the GMC. It wasn’t a game Hoener was particularly upset about, however.
“I liked the way we played, to be honest with you,” he said. “I thought we had a lot of the ball, I thought we had some really good scoring chances, but when it came down to making winning plays, [McGivney] made a couple of winning plays defensively, a couple of saves, and a winning play offensively, but I like the way we played.”
That 10-game unbeaten run sees McGivney’s record climb to 12-3-1 and 4-1 in the conference, something the Griffins can still split with the Althoff Catholic Crusaders.
“That’s one of the things that we want to do here. We want to push Althoff for that conference championship,” Schubert said. “It always seems like Marquette and us are second fiddle to Althoff, but these are always going to be battling games.”
The Crusaders beat McGivney in Glen Carbon back on September 9 by a score of 3-0. The rematch is on Thursday, October 9, in Belleville. Althoff is 4-0 in the conference. Should McGivney win the rematch and win out, the two could split the conference title.
“We’re still in this for the conference championship. We’ve got eyes to play at that level,” Schubert said. “We know that if we’re going to achieve goals like that, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be 1-0 wins over Marquette or grinding it out against Maryville Christian and just finding a way to get results.”
Marquette could lend a helping hand to the Griffins on Thursday, October 2, when the Explorers host Althoff.
McGivney has two more games this week, on Wednesday at home against Gibault, and on Thursday, right across the street at Maryville Christian.
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