Perryville soccer blanks Sikeston

SIKESTON -- With his team clinging precariously to a 1-0 lead early in the second half, Perryville soccer coach Jerry Fulton sensed his young squad needed a jolt.

Noticing a mismatch, he subbed Pablo Mattingly -- a 6-foot-2, 170-pound sophomore -- for fellow sophomore Eann Bergman, who was having difficulty marking Sikeston senior Steven Baker.

Three minutes later, the switch paid off. A long ball down the right side was centered and initially cleared by the Sikeston defense. But the Pirates' midfielders kept the ball in play, Emilio Mattingly sending a ball back in front of the goal. Junior Luke Schlichting leaped and headed the ball to the far corner, where Pablo Mattingly outjumped a Sikeston defender and headed the ball back into the far side of the net to give the Pirates a second goal and spark them to a 4-0 victory over the Bulldogs on Monday night.

"I saw a mismatch over there," Fulton said after the game. "I called Pablo off the bench and told him to look for the cross. Three minutes in, he did it. That was just amazing."

Perryville’s Pablo Mattingly scores the second goal of the game against Sikeston on a header Monday in Sikeston, Mo. (Fred Lynch)

The goal was big because it doubled Perryville's lead in a game where host Sikeston had assumed control -- on the field, if not on the scoreboard.

"I told our guys at halftime that we won the first 25 minutes, but Sikeston won the last 15 minutes of the first half," Fulton said. "I challenged them to pick it up in the second half."

The Pirates (8-1) had a game plan in place to play the ball wide, then attack in front of the goal. They missed several first-half chances that went either wide or high and led just 1-0 at the half, their lone goal coming on a free kick my Matt Moran from 30 yards out that snuck past a diving Caleb Hampton and trickled into the corner of the net in the ninth minute of the contest.

Sikeston (6-3-1) continued to be the aggressor until Pablo Mattingly's goal, which came in the game's 50th minute. The score seemed to take the fight out of the Bulldogs, and the Pirates added two more second-half goals to put the game away.

"We just started picking up our communication and stuck to the fundamentals," Moran said. "We just had to play like we knew how to play."

Mattingly's goal was a clear example of just that.

"We practice that every week," Mattingly said. "Take the corner, and cross it back. We always go and cross it and follow the shot."

Once Sikeston picked up the pace, their efforts failed to produce a tying score, which Bulldogs coach Doyle Noe said frustrated his squad.

"Very frustrating," he said. "We got the short corners, but we couldn't get them to go in. Good teams finish their chances, and Perryville certainly finished theirs tonight."

Adding late goals for the Pirates were Emmanuel Miranda, who followed a blocked header from Moran and powered it into the net in the 59th minute, and Conner Stark, who took a cross from Emilio Mattingly and shot low to the far corner past Hampton for the game's final score in the 78th minute.