Warren Central's Nikola Jokic defends the goal against Greenwood's Edin Hasanovic during their game at Central on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2013.

Patience was key for the Greenwood boys’ soccer team in a 1-0 win Tuesday at Warren Central.

Despite dominating on the offensive end, the Gators needed a goal from Michael Justice in the 72nd minute to break through for their first win of the season.

“It’s always a battle,” Greenwood coach Scott Gural said. “Those games get pretty tough. At least the guys didn’t get down on themselves and kept battling. We still have some work to do. A win is a win. It wasn’t very pretty, but we will gladly take it.”

Greenwood (1-1, 1-1 District 14) outshot the Dragons 21-6, with an 11-0 advantage in shots on goal, but the Gators couldn’t break through until late in the second half.

The Gators had five shots on goal in the first half, with several huge opportunities to put one into the net.

Dursun Akhmedov’s shot hit the top post in the 10th minute. Six minutes later, Hunter Sewell’s shot on a 2-on-1 break hit the left post.

Greenwood had several more point-blank looks but couldn’t finish the chances and went into the half locked in a scoreless tie.

“The talk at halftime was that creating the opportunities is good,” Gural said. “They had some nice runs. The problem is putting them all together. Runs don’t look good until you string together all those final passes. We have to keep working on that.”

Warren Central (1-2, 0-2) kept turning Greenwood away to start the second half, with freshman keeper Samir Manzulov making a pair of leaping saves.

Warren Central lost a man in the 71st minute, when Nair Korkutovic was given a red card after tackling Dursun Akhmedov on a breakaway.

“In my opinion it was a smart play to stop a man going one on one with the keeper,” Warren Central coach Aaron Ray said. “At the end of the day you leave your teammates a man down. We had to deal with that and didn’t fare too well.”

One minute later Justice took a cross from Munib Niksic for the only goal of the night.

“We worked the ball wide,” Justice said. “We kept trying to get the crosses in, and finally one of them came to my foot and I did what I had to do with it. We were definitely relieved after that (goal).”

Warren Central was unable to answer, failing to get a shot off in the final nine minutes.

Manzulov finished with seven saves.

“It’s all fixable,” Ray said. “That is the main thing. We have things that went wrong, but we can fix. We’re still trying a new system. They are still trying to get used to me being their coach and actually having a system to play with. It’s a lot better than what we had with South Warren. We’ll get there attacking-wise. It’s all about building for the later part of the season.”

Mitch O’Kelly picked up the shutout for the Gators.

Greenwood returns to action at 7:30 p.m. Thursday when it hosts Madisonville-North Hopkins.

Warren Central will play at Warren East at 7 p.m. Saturday.

— Micheal Compton covers prep sports. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/mcompton428 or visit bgdailynews.com.