Highlands – For 65 minutes on Nov. 1, Murphy boys soccer was putting together possibly its best performance this season. After being mercy-ruled by Smoky Mountain Conference champion Highlands in both regular-season matchups, the Bulldogs trailed just 2-1 entering the later stages.
The last 15 minutes weren’t pretty, as Highlands scored four goals to come away with a 6-1 win, However, it was still notable growth from earlier in the season.
“To see them grow and not make the same mistakes, they definitely did a better and significant job in adjusting and playing them better and smarter,” head coach Justin Butler said “It just happened the last 15 minutes I could see the legs were just burnt out, and I didn’t have enough speed to counteract it.”
In the first two matchups, Butler said Murphy (7-9-2 overall) struggled with the attacking style of Highlands (14-3-1). After getting the ball into the midfield, the Highlanders like to stack attackers on the line and try
to outrun defenders to the goal.
To counteract that, Butler played his defense higher up the field, as well as tight and physical on Highlands players, so they couldn’t build up any speed. He also had goalie Cale Harger play a little higher so he could clear the ball and not allow many easy shots.
“The big difference was when they came back to recover and run the play down, they made smart runs and smart movements, forcing a difficult shot instead of giving Highlands an easy shot,” Butler said. “Then the addition of Cale, our goalkeeper, making some monster, monster saves.”
After No. 5 seed Highlands scored two goals in the first 10 minutes, the No. 28 seed Bulldogs kept them off the scoreboard until near the end of the second half. Murphy’s Tyler Payne caught the Highlanders off guard and scored on a free kick in the 15th minute, but the Bulldogs couldn’t find the equalizer.
The loss ended a year where Murphy was trying to rebuild its program after not playing last year due to lack of participation. The Bulldogs will graduate three seniors and starters in Mann Barot, Daniel Garcia and Harper Martin, but the rest of Murphy’s main contributors were freshmen. That means the future is bright, but Butler would like to see his team get stronger and faster in the offseason, as well as master all of the fundamentals.
“Like I tell the guys all the time, it makes it very difficult if you can’t get the fundamentals down,” Butler said. “It doesn’t do much good teaching advanced tactical stuff. So we’ll continue to grind those fundamentals so we can continue to come up with advanced tactics and everything else.”