Football Sachems look to snap three-game slide after Gloucester loss

By Dom Nicastro

The Saugus High School football team dropped its third straight game – 27-8 on the road to Gloucester last Friday – and fell to 3-3. The Sachems are hoping to bounce back on the road in a non-league matchup at Falmouth at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 21. Falmouth is 1-5 and coming off a 27-6 loss to Dennis-Yarmouth.

Gloucester led Saugus, 21-0, at halftime and never trailed. Jordan Rodriguez found Ameen Taboubi for a 35-yard touchdown pass for Saugus’ only score. And Tommy DeSimone had an interception for the Sachems.

“We’ve got hit bad by the injury bug,” DeSimone said. “It’s especially hard to lose your starting quarterback and captain for the year especially with the kind of player Cam Preston is. Also losing Braden [Faiella] for two games and losing Danny Shea for the year. It’s been tough, but it’s easy to use injuries as an excuse. Things like this happen in life. It’s about turning adversity into opportunity.”

Faiella had a knee injury and returned for the Gloucester game. He said he is feeling good right now and looking to help Saugus turn things around in the final two regular-season games. Saugus is ranked No. 25 in Division 5 and needs to be in the top 16 to make the postseason.

“We definitely need to work on our offensive line for Falmouth,” Faiella said, “but we’ve already started the week hot on the line and gotta keep on working. The first three games the run game was very strong so that is a real big strength and also our defense as a whole when we are on our game is very strong.”

Faiella said Falmouth seems like it has some good athletes. It runs the triple option, “which might be complicated, but I believe in the team to shut that down,” he added.

DeSimone said Saugus this week has been getting back to basics on improving everything. “Football is a team sport,” he said. “It’s hard to say there is only one area of our game to improve on. We need to be better as a team. When we were at full strength our offense was extremely balanced, we were hard to stop. Not much to do when the run game was rushing for over 100 yards and we were throwing for 300 yards a game. Not to mention coach [Greg] Bluestein’s defense has been shut-down all year and won us some games early on.”

As for Falmouth, DeSimone said the record is deceiving. “I think Falmouth is a really good team,” DeSimone said. “Their record doesn’t show it. They’ve also played a really tough schedule but played all those teams extremely tough. They’re a big triple option team which can create problems for us defensively if we aren’t on our keys. But overall I feel good about the game, hopefully to get things rolling again going into senior night vs. Winthrop.”

Winthrop comes to Saugus Friday, Oct. 27 at 6:30 p.m.