Sky Blues Shatter Records in Final-Day Defeat

To paraphrase Carlos Wilcox, it is infamy to end a season and sign off anonymously – and the wooden-spooners of Manila Montet got the memo, as they signed off in bizarre style to open the final weekend of the PFL season, breaking a months-long drought and setting an unwanted record in going down 8-2 to Manila Digger.

Pong Liman’s Backhoe Brigade, who were firmly ensconced in 7th prior to the day’s games, took the lead early on as is customary in matches involving the hapless Montet – Su Diao opening the scoresheet in the 6th minute, tapping into goal after an interception high up the Sky Blues’ defensive third set him up with a golden opportunity. To Montet’s credit, they kept the score at 1-0 for a while, only conceding the 2nd in the 22nd minute. A loose ball kept pinging around red-shirted men for a while after having the initial passing move come up with nothing, but a failure to clear allowed Digger to reset the offense and profit off an Earl Japhet Piñero rocket going right to left and into the top corner.

While Montet tried to break at the Red and Yellow with woeful inefficiency, they would get broken in the 42nd minute as Su Diao hit his second of the game from a well-placed cross to make it 3-0 at that point and ice the game as a competitive exercise, and Salifu Jattah would join in the scoring party just before halftime; the Gambian colossus made it 4 to the Digger cause in the dying embers of first-half stoppage time as he shrugged off two defenders to blast it into the net.

The second half rang in some changes for the Backhoe Brigade, shuffling the pack to give other squad members some playing time at the end of a campaign that saw its ups and downs, and for the most part the start of the half played much the same as the majority of the first half. Salifu Jattah would wake everyone up in the 49th minute, however, as he hit his 2nd of the day on an acrobatic volley close to the goal after the Montet netminder bobbled a cross to make it 5-0. After another scoring lull, Jattah finally netted his hat-trick in the 73rd minute and consigned Montet to the history books as the first club in the history of the PFL to notch a 100-goal difference tally in a season; even the hapless Ilocos United in 2017 and a Global Cebu club spiraling into oblivion in 2019 were not able to cross the triple-digit threshold. Earl Piñero would rub further salt in the wound with his second of the day to make it 7-0 in the 76th minute, but a strange thing happened after this goal; Montet woke up.

They were able to draw a free-kick in midfield  and in one of the moments of all time, they would prey on Digger 3rd-string goalkeeper Joshua Jalog’s tendency to move up his box and hit a ball that drew him out, striker Mark Ordiz capitalizing after Jalog misjudged the ball to tap into goal in the 78th minute and break an 1164-minute scoring drought dating back to the last 6 minutes of the opening matchday vs OneTaguig 3 months ago, making it 7-1.

The goal lit everyone’s spirits in sky blue up, and it became a somewhat combative game, with Ordiz winning a penalty in the 85th minute after Jalog panicked at the sight of rushing sky blue shirts and drilled him with a belly-to-belly suplex, earning him his marching orders in the process. After the obligatory personnel shuffle attendant to goalies being sent off, Ordiz made history as he slotted past a deputizing Jovan Marfiga to make it 7-2 and become the benchmark of Montet scorers with his 2nd in 9 minutes. Seeing Montet grow into the game set off some panic in the Red and Yellow camp, and they pushed the tempo back up again, which had been noticeably dropping before Ordiz’ thunderbastard, and their renewed efforts were rewarded, but not until almost the last whistle as Su Diao finally got his own hat in the 92nd minute, being released from a great through ball and picking up the pieces after his initial shot caromed off the post to make it the final score of 8-2 and restore Montet’s 100-goal differential record in the process.