Ottawa boys soccer earns 3-1 win over Illinois Valley Central

OTTAWA — While not everything was clicking on all cylinders for the Ottawa boys soccer team in Wednesday’s match against Illinois Valley Central, the Pirates still found a way to walk away with a 3-1 victory.

The match, which was a resumption from Sept. 19 when play was stopped with 11 minutes, 10 seconds left in the first half after a Grey Ghosts player suffered a serious leg injury, began with the Pirates up 1-0.

“I felt like we were doing all the right things today, but the execution wasn’t necessarily there,” Ottawa coach Kevin Olesen said. “Today was a little out of the ordinary with resuming the match late in the first half and not really coming in with much practice time the last three days. It just took us way too long to get into any kind of rhythm. Give credit to IVC though, they came out ready to go right from the start and challenged every ball.

“We now have Sycamore on Wednesday, Mendota on Saturday and Rochelle and Streator next week. All four of those matches are going to really good tests for us heading into the postseason.”

Ottawa (12-4) made it a 2-0 contest with 2:37 to go before halftime when sophomore Alexio Fernandez sent a pass from the left side toward the goal. The twisting attempt found its way over the leaping IVC keeper and into the net.

“My thought in the moment was just to put the ball in front of the goal area and hopefully one of my teammates could get a head or foot on it,” Fernandez said. “It was meant to be a pass, but as soon as I struck it, saw where it was going, and I saw where the goalkeeper was, I knew it was going in. I’ve had that happen in practice before but never in a match. I’ll take it.

“I feel like we all were a little sloppy at times, but I think we started to play better as the match went along.”

Illinois Valley Central (4-15) made it 2-1 with 23:15 left in the second half on a goal by Channing Morris after he collected an errant clear attempt in the center of the box.

Ottawa then closed out the scoring with 1:25 remaining when Jorge Lopez collected a deflected ball off an Evan Snook rush and sent a shot into the low left corner of the cage. Snook had worked his way down the center of the pitch before Lopez seemingly took it off his foot to give the hosts a 3-1 advantage.

“Trust me, we talked about,” said Snook with a laugh and a smile. “But it’s an assist, the ball found its way into the back of the net and we got the win, so I’ll take it. It was just a play where I was able to get around one defender, another stepped up and the ball kind of deflected to Jorge. I would like to say it was a great heads-up pass, but really it was just a fortunate bounce that led to a goal.

“We won, but I’m not really happy with how we played today. We have to go to Sycamore on Wednesday and it’s going to take a much better all-around effort to get a win up there. We came out sloppy, but a win is a win. We’ll take it, but we all have to step things up moving forward.”

Pirates’ keeper Connor Diederich made six saves and a number of heads-up clears throughout the resumption of play.

Ottawa is next at Sycamore in an Interstate 8 Conference match on Wednesday.