Alianza Overwhelming
Ferreira Fire
Grilled Birds suffered an embarassingly one-sided beatdown by Honduran Liga Nacional club Valle Alianza, as the two-time Challenger Cup winners took the Birds on at their own game, and wiped the floor with them. Statistically, it was mostly a wash - possession was almost exactly evenly split, for instance - but Alianza had a balance about their team composition that Grilled simply could not match.
Valle Alianza, again as with Grilled, had a heavily local bias, with only their two central defenders for the day being from elsewhere: the Belgian Bert Temmer, and the towering Azamat Azenov, formerly capped for Kazakhstan. It was a who's who of the movers and shakers in the Honduras national scene elsewise, with skipper Efraín Toro a former youth international, left winger Nelson Amaya having appeared thirteen times in national colours, and talisman Giovani Badillo twenty-two times combined for both.
There was no indication that either side would bother much with defending, and as such the Grilled support wasn't particularly concerned, when Temmer cut through largely unopposed in the fourth minute, to catch
Massoud Dob unprepared with a half-volley on the go. They would be shaken up, however, when Orlando Betancourt did much the same barely two minutes later, leaving
Gilbert Webb and
Bhavya Panigrahi pointing fingers at each other.
Grilled managed to stabilize to a degree after that unpromising prelude, and tried to lean on
Cyril Künzler for output yet again, but the Pole had found his match today in the unreasonably talented - and hardworking - Amaya. Reduced to aimless hoof-ball, the Birds were making next to nothing of their possessions, while Alianza were far less wasteful. Leonel Ferreira showed
Moey Xin Seng up with some incredibly delicate control in the 21st, and seemed to have spellbound Dob as well, judging from how the goalkeeper palmed the shot into his inside netting.
No recovery was in sight as Justin Guedez piled misery on
Massoud Dob with a rocket from some ten yards outside the box as Grilled fluffed the restart. A barren forty minutes or so then followed, with Alianza apparently having self-invoked a mercy rule of sorts. The Birds were actually fairly exciting to watch in stretches, with
Chu Xin Lee posing all manner of problems to Temmer, but their opponents were just too cohesive to give up easy openings.
This was an ability that Grilled had not yet mastered, and just as their offence was getting back into stride, Alianza bit back and went five up. It was Betancourt who was standing watch near the corner of the Birds' penalty area on this occasion, and in the perfect spot as Justin Guedez's outswinging cross was missed by everybody else. The referee looked like he was considering blowing for an infringement by Panigrahi, but the decision was taken out of his hands, by Betancourt's sizzling mid-height volley to the near post.
The fixture had undeniably taken on the flavour of a training exercise, with Grilled playing the part of the juniors. With the drive to advance all but beaten out of them, the Birds were just counting the minutes down by now, with even
Moey Xin Seng unwilling to lift himself above a canter. Alianza were bossing the wings, and Nelson Amaya dragged a low one across for Guedez right after Betancourt's goal, but his fellow winger couldn't place it on target.
Not to worry for Alianza, as they were churning good opportunities out by the half-dozen anyway. It would be Leonel Ferreira's turn for glory, and he duly completed his hat-trick by the 74th minute, following a brutish right-footed hammerstrike up with a precise sidefoot in off the upright, having made sure to first draw
Kalki Parvathaneni out of the way with a feint.
It was only then that
Chan Ze Han was allowed on, and while the best of the Birds' younger generation might not have been on top form, his spirit more than made up for it, and evidently shamed his teammates to redouble their efforts;
Bhavya Panigrahi, who hadn't been exerting himself since about half-time, put in a stinger of a tackle on Alejandro Morillo, which got him a yellow card. Grilled pushed for a consolation, and sent
Kohei Okuya on in the dying minutes towards that end, but Leonel Cadenas would remain largely untested, a testament to Alianza's overriding success at defending from the front.
