Sockers Can’t Win Game of Catch-Up : Soccer: Cleveland’s third-quarter deluge buries Sockers, 9-3. Defending champs fall to 1-5 on season.

The Sockers learned two things in Sunday night’s 9-3 loss to the Cleveland Crunch in front of 7,337 at the Sports Arena.

One, just because someone puts on a Sockers uniform doesn’t mean he’s going to be transformed into a soccer player.

And two, because the Sockers do not possess an abundance of skill as in years past, the super power play, a ploy first used by the Sockers in 1981, may be obsolete.

Down 4-1 late in the third quarter and Cleveland shorthanded because of a boarding penalty assessed to Marco Rizi for checking Wes Wade, Socker Coach Ron Newman pulled goalie Victor Nogueira for a sixth attacker.

By putting six players against four, the Sockers have always been able to use short passes and control the ball. Not any more.

Sixteen seconds into the super power play, Crunch defender George Fernandez, a former Socker, picked up a loose ball in his end, put his hands in his pockets, kicked back and started whistling.

“Usually,” Fernandez said, “I lose those balls or kick them into the stands.”

But this time was different. No one pressured Fernandez.

“So I looked up and saw an empty goal. What can you do? You have to shoot it.”

He chipped it the length of the field into the open net, giving Cleveland a four-goal lead, 5-1.

“The ball goes into the middle, and George Fernandez has seconds to play the ball. He has seconds ,” Newman said. “No one makes an effort to get to him.”

If it wasn’t the goal that took away all hope of a comeback, it did at least illustrate a point made by Socker defender Kevin Crow.

“We’re in every game going into the third period,” he said, “but we’re not in them coming out of the third period.”

Indeed, it was 2-1 Cleveland going into the third quarter and 6-2 15 minutes later.

experience as the culprit.

“We have players who give their utmost, but who don’t know what to do with the ball,” Newman said.

He also said that with the Sockers’ inexperience, they can not afford to let opponents run up the score.

“We try to play catch-up,” Newman said, “and we’re just not good enough to do that. We kept giving the ball away. Nobody wanted it. It was like a piece of coal at the end.

Fernandez, who played with the Sockers three years before signing during the summer with Cleveland, wasn’t bashful when asked if he had ever seen the Sockers play so poorly.

“No, never,” he said. “The talent is just not there anymore. They lost a lot of players over the summer, a lot of quality players and I think they are now in a process of rebuilding. They have a lot of young players who run all over the place, but they have no continuity.”

The only bright spot for the Sockers came from a player whom management didn’t even want to sign--Paul Dougherty, who scored all three Socker goals.

Dougherty, in fact, gave the Sockers a 1-0 lead four minutes into the game by kicking in a rebound of a shot from Keder.

But the Crunch scored the next five goals, including three from Hector Marinaro. When Dougherty scored his second with a minute to go in the third quarter and his fourth four minutes later, they were only enough to bring the Sockers within two, 6-4.

Cleveland then scored three more in less than four minutes.

“It wasn’t the defense’s fault,” said Wade. “It was the whole team. Everybody was just running back and forth. There was no composure.”

Wade had a tough night. Besides being checked into the boards, he was flipped into the air and landed on his back when Cleveland goalie P.J. Johns charged him after he broke through the defense late in the first quarter.

The Sockers thought Johns should have been whistled on the play.

“I still don’t know why that wasn’t a shootout,” Newman said, shaking his head. “No one even touches the ball. Strange call . . . It wasn’t a shootout, not a penalty, not even a foul.”

Wade couldn’t believe there was no whistle either.

“P.J. Johns is just an idiot,” he said. “He didn’t even come out to play the ball. He came out to play me.”

The Sockers now possess what Cleveland owned at the end of last year--the league’s worst record. They are 1-5, last in the Western Division.

Sockers Notes

The Sockers will practice today in the arena. Where they will practice on Tuesday is anyone’s guess. Sunday night they were still without a practice rink. Friday, the team was evicted from the San Diego Indoor Soccer Center when Tom Higginson, owner of the center, took exception to published remarks by Socker forward Branko Segota regarding the rink’s hard surface. Sockers President Ron Cady, however, has since opened a dialogue with Higginson and will meet with him this morning in Salt Lake City.