Another year, another battle with Chester.
The winner of the game this year was … as Raider play-by-play announcer Brian Larkin likes to say … YOUR O’Neill Raiders. The game was on Friday night, Oct. 30, at O’Neill’s Waldo Wood Field. It was senior night, a ‘black out’ game for the fans, and it sealed the regular season for the two football squads.

The final score was 21-16. Mickey Flynn scored on a one-yard touchdown run; Trey Murphy scored on a nine-yard run; and quarterback AJ Mackey threw a 29-yard pass to Jack Bione for the winning score. Bione also had his fifth interception of the season in the game. Mackey was six-for-13 in passing with 56 yards.

Raider Coach Adam DiBenedetto called it a dogfight. Chester scored first, but missed the extra point, O’Neill scored a bit later in the first quarter and got the extra point. In the second quarter Chester scored eight points, O’Neill six. Neither scored in the third, and in the final quarter Chester had two points and O’Neill had eight.

“Even though they are not quite the same team from the past couple of seasons, it was still a dogfight against them,” he said, noting “we also decided we weren’t going to make it easy for ourselves with the number of penalties we committed in the game. 12 penalties in a game is simply far too many to commit and playing like that in the future can easily result in us getting knocked out of the playoffs.”

So, while they have a few things to work on this week before playoffs start, DiBenedetto was happy with his team’s performance.

“After one big play that gave Chester a big gain on their first possession, our defense settled in,” the coach said. “They played well, especially in the second half. Zachary Parks was especially disruptive on defense. Filling in for the injured Keegan Arbogast, he forced a fumble and recovered it, and also had a big-time interception near the end of the game that very well could have been another Chester touchdown.”

Offensively, he said, “some things changed while some things stayed the same”.
Flynn, for instance, got his first score.

“He’s a hardworking senior for us, got into the end zone to start the scoring. He’s been in the program since he was on modified and deserved to get into the end zone,” DiBenedetto said. “And the go-ahead touchdown was scored on a 27-yard pass from AJ to Jake - the two connected for their first touchdown since the opening game against Haldane.

What stayed the same, he said, was Murphy.

“Trey ran the ball 24 times for 161 yards and scored a touchdown on an 8-yard run. This performance put him over 1000 yards for the season, which is especially meaningful because of the two games that went unplayed earlier in the year.”

Looking ahead a week, DiBenedetto, again, knows what needed to be done in practices this week.

“It was nice to get a win against Chester, because they are always tough to beat, but being a playoff team, we have to execute better and make fewer mistakes to be able to beat Dover next week. They are going to be coming in looking for revenge so if we are sloppy we are going to get beat. Plain and simple.”

The #2 Raiders (6-3) will take on #3 Dover (5-3) in the Class C division playoffs at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 6, at O’Neill. The winner of that game advances to the section championship game at Monroe-Woodbury High School at noon on Saturday, Nov. 14.