The young Northampton soccer team has struggled to find offense this season and the trend continued Monday night against Emmaus. In a game interrupted by a 15-minute outage of the lights at Al Erdosy Stadium, the Hornets were able to get away with a 2-0 win over the Konkrete Kids.

Emmaus (4-0-1 EPC, 4-0-2 overall) was able to put consistent, heavy pressure on the Northampton (2-3, 2-4) defense early in the game. The defense and a strong outing by goalkeeper Vincent Santostefano kept Emmaus off the board until the 9:40 mark of the first half. Even then, it was a controversial foul call against Northampton that gave the Hornets a penalty kick that Jaeden Amato took advantage of and sailed past Santostefano.

The Northampton defense stiffened in the second half and the offense found some holes. Just five-minutes into the last half of regulation play, Northampton put a shot on goal that was stopped by goalie Max McGrath. The ball bounded right back to a Northampton player who followed up the shot with another that went just over the net by the far corner.

“We only returned three varsity players and it’s very difficult to get goals for us, but these guys have been playing hard and working hard. They’ve been listening to the tactics and today we did a little different tactic because it’s against a team that is known for scoring goals,” said coach Ryan Brazuk.

One minute after Northampton just missed on a scoring opportunity, Emmaus put pressure back on the Northampton defense, but Santostefano was again up to the task and made an athletic play to tap a shot on goal wide of the net.

“Vince kept us in the game all night and played a great game for us,” said Brazuk of Santostefano’s performance. “He’s got an all-new full back line in front of him, so there is a lot of pressure on him to perform and he has come up big for us.”

Emmaus got an insurance goal with just over eight-minutes left in regulation when Carlos Morales that went off the tips of Santostefano’s fingers and found the back of the net.

Earlier in the season, Northampton scored six goals in a 6-0 win over Dieruff. In their three other games through Monday night, they had scored a total of one goal. A night after falling to Emmaus, the Konkrete Kids traveled to Pocono Mountain West (1-5, 1-6) and downed the Panthers 10-2.

Brazuk has seen definite improvement as the season has gone on and likes how his team is competing.

“I think we’re a much better team that we were when the season started,” Brazuk noted. “We have obviously had a lot of work to do with all of the young players and they’ve put in the work that’s necessary. Every game we see guys developing more and more.”