The Warrenton Warriors dropped a back and forth contest against St. Charles Monday.
Warrenton (5-11) fell to St. Charles 5-3 Monday in a game at Warrenton High School. The teams combined for six second half goals in the game.
Warrenton jumped out to a lead about halfway through the first half. Santiago Cano scored the opening goal with just under 20 minutes left in the first half. St. Charles sophomore Jude Archie scored less than three minutes later to tie the game going into halftime. Warrenton soccer coach John Schulte said Warrenton’s focus was to put pressure on St. Charles in the first half. Warrenton had the wind at their backs in the first half.
“We were doing pretty good,” Schulte said. “We were passing the ball around. We had a couple chances on goal. Got one. So it’s 1-1 at half so yeah I thought we were looking pretty good going into the second half.”
St. Charles scored three goals in the first 12:03 of the second half to take a 4-1 lead. Liam Cassidy, Jude Archie and Charlie Thomas each scored in the second half to give St. Charles a 4-1 lead.
“Adjusting to the wind was a little bit of an issue,” Schulte said. “We’re used to hitting the ball and it carrying an extra 10 and now all of the sudden, it’s not doing that. So just adjusting to that because we had a couple balls we hit and they didn’t go anywhere. They capitalized on it coming back at us. We’ve just got to adjust to the wind when it happens.”
Warrenton responded with a pair of goals over a 10 minute span to trim the Pirate lead to 4-3. Hector Cortes scored with 19:25 remaining to trim the deficit to two goals. Bryan Guerrero scored with under 10 minutes left to pull the Warriors within one goal at 4-3. Twenty- five seconds later, Ethan Mercurio knifed through the Warrenton defense to score and make it 5-3.
Warrenton had multiple chances to score late in the game but was unable to capitalize on any of the opportunities.
“We have a wide open net at the end and just missed,” Schulte said. “So even though it’s a two-goal gap, we definitely could have scored two or three right there at the end. One on one with the goalie, hit the keeper. We just missed that one wide. It could have easily been 5-5, 6-5 us. It kind of opened up in the second half and both teams were getting some opportunities.”
Warrenton is scheduled to play at Hannibal Thursday. They will host O’Fallon Christian at 5 p.m. Friday.