MARBLEHEAD – The Marblehead football team knew Beverly would bring its A-game to Friday night’s battle at Piper Field.
After a low-scoring, back-and-forth first half, the Magicians settled into the flow of things. Marblehead scored twice in the second half en route to a 21-13 win over the Panthers.
The Panthers thought they had broken on top against the Magicians early in the first quarter, when running back Jaichaun Stanton-Jones raced in from 57 yards out, but the score was wiped out by a Panther penalty.
Stanton-Jones came back and broke one for 54-yards on Beverly’s next possession, this one counted, and Joseph Kotwicki’s PAT kick put the Panthers on top 7-0 with 3:10 left in the first quarter.
Marblehead responded before the quarter ended when quarterback Joshua Robertson found A. J. Russo as he cut across the center of the field for a 36-yard score. Eli Feingold’s PAT kick tied it at 7-7 with 16 seconds left in the first.
The game quieted down in the second quarter, and in the third quarter, with both teams looking to see who could make the biggest hit on defense to hopefully spark their offense. Beverly was laying everything out to retake the lead, but the Magicians responded to every Beverly hard tackle with one of their own, and the game would be decided in the final 12 minutes.
Marblehead’s Tim Cronin’s scored the first of his two touchdowns to put Marblehead up 14-7, three minutes into the fourth. It was another Beverly turnover that allowed the Magicians to double up the lead to 21-7. T. Monahan pounced on a Beverly fumble at the Marblehead 30, and on the next play Cronin was in the end zone again, this time from 70 yards out. Duncan Moreland’s touchdown closed the scoring for 21-13 final. Cronin said his team was determined to play better in the second half after a few adjustments.
“We definitely were struggling moving the ball in the first half, the second half we went in, we looked at what we had to do, the line stepped it up and played awesome, everyone stepped it up, it was a change in momentum, really,” Cronin said.
Beverly coach Andrew Morency said his team gave its best shot, but it got what it expected in a solid game from Marblehead.
“Both teams were playing hard, we’re banged up, they’re banged up, it was the game we expected from them,” Morency said.
Magicians coach Jim Rudloff said his team might have tried to do too much early on.
“We may have been overthinking things, trying to do too much early, we made mistakes, but this high school football, you have to play through those mistakes,” Rudloff said. “We know they’re banged everybody’s banged up now, kids in Danvers, Peabody, and in Nebraska, everybody playing high school football is banged up, you have to play through it, and we were able to.”
