Turnovers kill Bishop Guertin football in loss to Pinkerton

DERRY – The plan wasn’t necessarily to kick it away from Manny Latimore, but the Bishop Guertin High School football team had a good idea what was coming if it did.

On the first play of the second quarter of Saturday’s game between the Cardinals and Pinkerton Academy, Bishop Guertin’s Drew Sandborn got off a good punt. But the ball was in a perfect position for Latimore, the Astros’ talented junior, to field cleanly and for Pinkerton to set up its return.

Latimore ran to his right, got to the corner and flew down the sideline for 66 yards to score the game’s first touchdown. It would be the only score Pinkerton needed, as the Astros knocked off the Cardinals 20-3 in a crossover game.

“Ideally, we don’t want him to punt it to (Latimore),” Bishop Guertin coach Travis Cote said. “It’s a high school kid and he’s just trying to get the ball away. The kid is a sophomore and we can’t blame him for that.

“We told them they like to set up a wall on punt returns and they like to return it to their bench. I don’t think any of those kids were thinking that they’re setting up a wall return. They got a big one on us.”

For Pinkerton, it was the second straight opening-day win over Bishop Guertin, and once again, it was ugly.

“We talked all week, could we please play Bishop Guertin and not shoot ourselves in the foot,” Pinkerton coach Brian O’Reilly said. “It was ugly. Only positive thing I take out of this is it’s a win, and I’ve got stuff on film I can take and hammer it home to them that they’ve got work to do.”

The Astros forced five turnovers, four of which came on the Cardinals’ first four drives of the second half. But once Pinkerton got the ball, its offense floundered.

The Astros’ had 166 yards on offense, or just a hundred more than on Latimore’s punt return. Pinkerton lost a fumble of its own on Bishop Guertin’s goal line and committed seven penalties for 70 yards.

“Offensively, not good, too many mistakes,” O’Reilly said. “Give some credit to the BG defense. They have a very good defense. We’re supposed to get a helmet on someone.

“There were several occasions where the running back was getting hit and I didn’t have a helmet on him. That doesn’t happen in our offense, but it happened.”

Bishop Guertin outgained Pinkerton in the second half, 59-37, and the Cardinals ran 14 plays in the third quarter, compared to the Astros two three-and-outs. Pinkerton also didn’t pick up a first down in the second half until the final two minutes of the game.

“Our defense played awesome, we really did,” Cote said. “But you can’t beat a team like that turning the ball over five times. That was certainly the difference.

“They’re a lot bigger than us up front. They’ve got some good linebackers who were able to disrupt some things on us. We couldn’t go straight at them. We had to do some stuff throwing the ball and it was there at times, and sometimes we didn’t make the right decision.”

Bishop Guertin quarterback Thomas Hurley made his first varsity start and completed 8 of 15 passes for 54 yards and two interceptions. But the Astros couldn’t take advantage of either turnover, and it wasn’t until Hurley’s fumble midway through the fourth that Pinkerton capitalized.

Pinkerton’s Andrew Ong recovered the fumble and returned it 40 yards to the Cardinals’ 7, and three plays later, Matt St. Onge punched it in from 1 yard out to make it 20-3.

The Cardinals fumbled the ball away again on their next possession and Pinkerton was able to run out clock.

“When you have five turnovers, and we didn’t, but we should have blown them out,” O’Reilly said. “What happened in our three scrimmages, we just rolled over people. When you give that film to kids, everything is ‘we don’t have anything to worry about.’

“When you can get film of you screwing up, when we look at films on Monday, we won’t look at the good plays. We show them mistakes and that’s how we get better.”