Bishop Guertin's Ryan Mogielnicki, center, and Trenton Cormier, right, battle an airborn Pinkerton's Braeden Wheeler for the ball at midfield duringTuesday night' s Division I clash at Stellos Stadium. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – There’s no doubt the Bishop Guertin High School boys soccer team is much improved over a year ago.

The Cards just didn’t show that on Tuesday night.

They were just a bit flat, especially offensively, against a high motor Pinkerton Academy team that left Stellos Stadium with a 3-0 victory.

“It’s the worst we played in five games,” Cards coach Tyler Vandeventer said, his team now 3-3-3. “We had a great (practice) session yesterday, very functional. Everybody’s mindset has been well improved from last year. I’m very excited about BG soccer moving forward. …I think (tonight) we were just disconnected a little.”

The disconnect in trying to get down the field on offense for two-thirds of the game fed into the 5-2-2 Astros attack, which isn’t the same from a few games ago. They moved defender Hayden Marshall up to striker. He was robbed point blank early in the game by Cards keeper Beau Boughter (six saves) and put another over the bar, and while he didn’t score, his constant energy was something that sparked the Pinkerton offense.

“We shifted our lineup around,” Astros longtime coach Kerry Boles said. “We hadn’t been scoring a ton of goals. We put him up front, and in two games we’ve outscored our opponents 6-0.

“They just kept going and going and going, even up 3-0. It’s a hard working group, they keep going for the entire 80 minutes.”

The Astros got a goal off a rush down right wing that ended up on the foot of Andrew Perfetto some 22 minutes into the game, and he buried it for the only goal of the half.

But they put the game away in the second when Ryan Oliviera scored off a corner just shy of a minute in, and just a few minutes later Jack Welch scored off a scramble that made it 3-0. Game, set, match.

“We weren’t paying attention for two of them,” Vanderventer said.

And he noticed the disconnect on offense, which improved as the second half went on thanks to striker Trenton Cormier, but the Astros defense wasn’t exactly swiss cheese, either.

“We baby sat him pretty well,” Boles said, and when we felt we had control of him, we dropped a defender and had only three in the back and that created even more offense for us.”

But, despite the control his team had, even Boles agrees that the Cards are a better team than their 2023 version.

“Oh, there’s no question about that,” Boles said.

But Tuesday’s game tape won’t show it.