BATH — For a 15-minute stretch in the second half of a scoreless game, Gorham teed up corner kick after corner kick. A persistent drizzle made the ball slick and the outcome uncertain.
“We managed to clear them all out,” said Lewiston keeper Dido Lumu. “I couldn’t catch as many balls as I wanted to catch. It was really hard. It slipped off my gloves, but hey, we managed to win.”
After thwarting Gorham on seven corner kicks, the Blue Devils finally countered with a quick strike. Suab Nur found the corner from 15 yards in the 68th minute to give Lewiston a 1-0 victory in the Class A boys’ soccer state championship game Saturday afternoon at McMann Field.
The title is the second in a row for Lewiston (16-0-2), and its third in four years. Gorham finishes 16-1-1.
“We had them on the ropes,” Gorham Coach Tim King said. “We really needed to get one, and we just couldn’t quite get one in.”
Gorham’s last chance came on an eighth corner kick in the final two minutes. Brady King sent it into the box, and Rams keeper Trevor Gray, in all-hands-on-deck mode, managed to get a head on it, but the ball deflected off to the side.
Earlier, the Rams had three free kicks put in play by junior midfielder Andrew Rent. The first was a low shot that curled around Lewiston’s wall and required a diving stop by Lumu, and the last two were passes that didn’t bear fruit.
“Seeing Rent with the ball was scary,” said Lumu, who finished with four saves. “Whenever he had the ball, I had to be ready, be set, because I knew he was going to shoot it.”
After withstanding sustained pressure, the Blue Devils struck. Derek Metivier found Bilal Hersi up the middle, and Hersi, after a quick back-and-forth with Jama Abdullahi, set up Nur on the right wing.
“I was about to take a touch when I saw Suab open,” Hersi said. “I just gave it to him and he sent a really good shot.”
By swiping at the ball with the outside of his right foot, Nur imparted a left-to-right curve on his shot, bending it back into the net inside the far post. Gray, who finished with five saves, leaped to his right but could not reach the ball.
“They have really good patience,” Gray said. “You’re sitting there waiting for it and they move the ball around the whole time. They’re a very skilled group of kids, very talented.”
The Rams last won a state title in 1981. They lost 2-1 to Bangor in the 2016 championship game.
“Our kids understood that Gorham is very good on dead-ball situations and they rose to the challenge,” Lewiston Coach Mike McGraw said. “We’ve got good athletes and they made sure when (Gorham) got a set piece, we were on high alert. You have to be intense, you have to be ready, and we were.”
Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or:
Twitter: GlennJordanPPH
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