Boys’ soccer: Lots of fake injuries in Royal’s 2-0 wild-card victory

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Soccer has got to be the only high school sport where fans boo when someone gets injured. And that’s only because the player usually isn’t injured.

I lost count of how many times Royal and Highland players tumbled to the ground in apparent agony during their Division I wild-card contest on Wednesday. Of course, pretty much all of them seemed to miraculously perk up once the play was whistled dead.

And, on the couple of occasions when a player really was injured, it took the coaches and refs a few moments to determine whether he was really injured. Give me a break. This sort of stuff shouldn’t be tolerated at the high school level.

OK, enough of my soccer-related injury rant -- let’s get back to what actually happened in the game. Thanks to second-half goals by leading scorer Paris Figeroa and Joe Acevedo, Royal reserved itself a bus trip to Long Beach with a 2-0 victory over the Bulldogs. Royal will play a very good Millikan squad in the first round on Friday.

As for Highland, other than David Salguero’s header off the goalpost in the second minute of the game, the Bulldogs were outplayed in this one. At least Coach Lem Galvao and the boys can be happy they made the playoffs for the second consecutive season.

Here’s a quick interview I recorded with Figeroa:

-- Austin Knoblauch