Swampscott grid defeats English

SWAMPSCOTT – You have to give Lynn English coach Peter Holey credit for coming up with probably the line of the year to sum up what took place at Blocksidge Field on Saturday after his team fumbled six times, losing five of them, in a 33-19 loss to Swampscott.”Fumbles kill everything. They kill momentum,” said Holey. “And they kill football coaches.”It was the five lost fumbles, and six total turnovers, that the 4-0 Big Blue turned into the 14 points that helped decide the game.Click here for a photo gallery.Needless to say, Swampscott coach Steve Dembowski was very pleased with his defense’s play.”We asked the defense to stop the run and for the most part they did that,” Dembowski said. “We worked really hard this week in getting ready and the kids bought into what we wanted to do. We wanted to make a statement that we have a defense to be reckoned with.”Despite six of their eight first-half possessions ending in a punt or fumble, the Bulldogs (2-2) still trailed by only a touchdown (12-5) at the half. And less than a minute into the third quarter, that deficit got erased when Malcolm Brown-Simpson picked off a Mike Walsh throw and returned it 40 yards to the house.With the game at its crossroads, the Big Blue responded to the challenge on both sides of the ball.First, Walsh (259 yards passing, 65 yards rushing) engineered a quick five-play drive that needed less than two minutes to cover 65 yards, capped by a nine-yard keep by the Brown-bound QB for a 19-12 lead.Then, late in the third, with English on the march, the Big Blue defense forced Jermaine Kelly (16-of-35, 150 yards) into his only errant throw of the game as Frank Legere picked off the ball at the Swampscott 30 and returned it to the Bulldog 42.Four plays later, Walsh threw a perfect strike to Richard Sullivan for a 30-yard touchdown and a 25-12 Swampscott lead after three quarters.”We made too many mistakes and you can’t do that against a bad team, let alone against a good team like Swampscott,” Holey said.English’s next two possessions would die on fumbles, the second of them coming when Kelly coughed up the pigskin inside the Swampscott 10. Two snaps later, Walsh floated his third touchdown of the game to Aidan Lang for a 33-12 Big Blue lead with 8:03 remaining.The Bulldogs would get a score back with 5:19 to go as Kelly’s two-yard run capped a 12-play march. But Walsh and company embarked on a drive that killed much of the remaining time before it stalled at the English five with 1:54 left.Fittingly, the Big Blue defense put the game away as Malcolm Brown-Simpson was stripped at the 20 on a pass and Swampscott recovered to run out the clock.Swampscott took a 6-0 lead late in the first quarter on an eight-yard Evan Rhodes touchdown run. But the extra-point snap was fumbled and Brown-Simpson scooped it up and returned it 96 yards for two points.English then turned an A.J. Baker fumble into a 26-yard Chris Lessard field goal later in the quarter to cut the lead to 6-5 after one.”We knew in the first quarter that it was going to be a battle in the conditions,” Dembowski said. “But we got so many different guys making plays out there. And after that pick six, the guys bore down and did a great job.”Walsh and Baker would hook up to provide the only points of the second quarter when they connected for a 12-yard score on a fourth-and-three play with 6:07 left in the half.