LEWISTON — Allow junior Molly Bourget to go unattended in front of the net and there is bound to be trouble.
Bourget scored the tying and winning goals in the final 10 minutes of the game as Buckfield earned an exciting 3-2 victory over Lisbon in a Class C South girls soccer game under the rain-drenched lights at Lewiston High School on Monday evening.
“The girls stuck with the plan, and I was just telling them that,” Buckfield coach Larry Thornton said. “The first 15 minutes of the first half we were doing things we wanted to do. Then we got away from it toward the end of the first half and that’s when they got their goals.
“We weren’t very focused. We got a little bit lazy and then we talked about it at halftime and I said, ‘We’ve got to do what we want to do,’ and the girls stuck to the plan. That was moving the ball. Getting good shots instead of taking bad shots in the first half. They have been playing well. We’ve been on the short end of some games.”
The Greyhounds (4-5) built a sturdy 2-0 lead going into halftime, but the Bucks didn’t seem fazed by Lisbon’s two-goal edge or the steady rain.
“We knew going into it that (the Greyhounds) are a very, very aggressive team,” Bourget said, “and I think it caught us off guard a little bit, and they got up 2-0. …”
The Bucks (8-3) slowly closed in on the Greyhounds at the beginning of the second half, but it was Buckfield’s first goal at 14:28 that got the team moving in the right direction. Lynn Szabo lofted the ball over Lisbon goalie Sarah Haggerty’s head without assistance to make the Greyhounds feel a bit uncomfortable.
Szabo’s first strike riled the Bucks, who kept probing on offense.
Bourget’s first goal came with 3:16 left in the game on a Deja Bennett assist to tie the contest. For the next two minutes, Buckfield tried everything to break the deadlock.
Then Bourget stepped up again and went solo on her second goal with 49 seconds left in the game to shelve the pesky Greyhounds.
“It was a full team effort,” Bourget said. “I was just there to put it in the back of the net. It was just bouncing around, and I got the lucky foot (on the ball). The third one we had beautiful 1-2 passes that got us through the defense, and I just found a corner and just placed it in.”
Thornton was please but not surprised at Bourget’s heroics late in the second quarter.
“Molly is a tremendous player. She is a tremendous leader,” Thornton said. “When she is on her game like this, she is one of the best in the MVC.”
In the first half, Buckfield suffered some lapses and Lisbon took advantage.
Senior striker Kiley Merritt scored her first of two goals with assistance from senior Giana Russo. At 3:52, Merritt struck again on an assist by junior midfielder Destiney Deschaines to give Lisbon some breathing room and a 2-0 lead.
“I don’t know what happened (in the second half),” Lisbon coach Jenniffer Perron said. “The energy switched rapidly, and we went from calm and collected to just chaos.
“I am not sure where the breakdown in communication happened, but we just couldn’t keep the ball on ground or in possession. We played with the ball too much and didn’t make quick enough passes.”
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