Streamwood trips up Burlington Central

Two of the Fox Valley’s top boys soccer teams squared off at Millennium Field Saturday in a defensive battle that ended with just one goal being scored.

That goal belonged to Streamwood’s Jasminko Dizdarevic, who took a feed from teammate Nestor Ascencio in the first half as the Sabres (14-2-3) then used 4 saves from Sergio Blanco to register their seventh straight shutout and 13th overall in a 1-0 nonconference win over Burlington Central.

The loss snapped the Rockets’ 15-game winning streak.

“Burlington Central is a very good (Class 2A) team,” said Streamwood coach Matt Polovin. “They are very scrappy. They did everything they could to give us a game. With our style, they probably haven’t seen that all season. We’re very quick and we moved it around a lot.”

Polovin praised the continued high-level play of the senior, Ascencio.

“They’ve never seen Nestor, who sliced and diced his way finding guys,” Polovin said. “Nestor is the best player in the state and one of the best in the country. He makes watching high school soccer fun. He’s so smooth and he’s a tireless worker for 80 minutes.”

Brett Rau had an outstanding game between the pipes for the Rockets (17-2-0), making 8 saves.

“Both goalkeepers played extremely well today,” said BC coach Mike Gecan. “Streamwood is a very good team and they outplayed us in the first half. We had some chances in the second half to make it interesting. but I guess it wasn’t meant to be for us today. Hopefully we were able to learn something from this experience.”