By: Eoghan Kelly, News staff
Head coach Brian Ainscough hoped his men’s soccer squad would play more comfortably in their regular season finale at the College of William & Mary after clinching a playoff berth with a 2-0 victory over Old Dominion University Oct. 29.
“We’re not going down there [to William & Mary] having to fight to the end,” Ainscough said Oct. 31. “Hopefully we’ll be loose down there and that’ll give us a chance to play a little bit freer, so hopefully we can get a win.”
But the Huskies weren’t exactly “loose.” Far from it, actually. Despite the comfort of knowing they were not battling for their postseason lives, they spent Saturday night playing like they had something to prove.
Northeastern twice clawed back from a goal down to force overtime before dropping a 3-2 heartbreaker to the Tribe in extra time. The Huskies finished the regular season at 10-6-2 overall and 6-4-1 in Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) play, good for fifth place in the conference.
“Any time you’re four games over .500 at this time of the year, you’re heading in a good direction,” assistant coach Adam Pfeifer said. “Now we’ve really got our work cut out for us this week, and hopefully we can get a few good results and get ourselves back in that NCAA tournament picture.”
William & Mary (10-8, 7-4 CAA) peppered the Northeastern back line through the first 42 minutes of the match, producing eight shots, three corner kicks and forcing four saves from junior keeper Oliver Blum. As the clock ran toward the halftime break, it appeared as though the Huskies might escape the half unscathed but it didn’t stay that way long.
When defender Roshan Patel took control of a throw-in from defender Michael Teiman, Patel unleashed a strike from 25 yards past Blum for a 1-0 lead going into the midway break.
“Any time you let up a goal right before halftime, it’s difficult and it’s something that can take the wind out of your sails a little bit,” Pfeifer said. “Fortunately, for us, we recovered right away.”
The Huskies’ response came less than two minutes into the second half. Senior forward Josh Semerene found fellow senior forward Mike Kennedy with a cross that Kennedy finished to the near post and past senior goalkeeper Colin Smolinsky to level the score at a goal apiece. The score was Kennedy’s fifth of the season.
But Northeastern struggled to create offensive opportunities after the goal, producing just two shots in the following 20 minutes, neither of which tested Smolinsky. The Tribe took the lead again in the 67th minute when Blum stopped sophomore midfielder Ben Coffey’s shot but let the rebound slip away. Freshman forward Josh West was there to tap home his first goal in 2011.
Less than 30 seconds later, the score was level again, at 2-2, after junior forward Don Anding finished off a pass from senior midfielder Top Phataraprasit from just inside the penalty box for his second goal of the season.
Pfeifer said some of the squad’s best play comes after conceding goals to their opposition.
“It’s been a frustrating thing more than anything,” Pfeifer said. “We’ve gone down a lot this year, so it’s been difficult when we had to get ourselves back in our games. The boys have done well to respond … [and] were able to put teams under great pressure.”
But in the sudden-death overtime format of college soccer, there is no opportunity to equalize after going a goal down. The Huskies’ regular season ended bitterly when senior midfielder Nicolas Abrigo capitalized on a Northeastern turnover and played a ball to freshman midfielder Chris Albiston streaking through the center of the pitch. Albiston forced Blum off his line and tucked a shot into the vacated net for his first collegiate goal and a 3-2 Tribe victory.
“When you get in overtime situations, sometimes it’s a flip of the coin,” Pfeifer said. “You got tired legs out there sometimes. It just got away from us a little bit at the end.”
Their fifth-place finish earned the Huskies a date with No. 4 Delaware University in the CAA Men’s Soccer Championship quarterfinals tonight at the James Madison University (JMU) Soccer Complex in Harrisonburg, Va. The Blue Hens beat Northeastern, 2-1, courtesy of two first-half goals in their only regular-season meeting of 2011.
Pfeifer said they will use the lessons learned from that loss to avoid lethargic play and conceding early goals in the first half of the quarterfinals.
“The idea is to come out and have a better start the first 15 minutes,” Pfeifer said. “Be playing at 0-0, hopefully, or up a goal 15 minutes into the game, as opposed to down two goals. Nothing too complicated, we just want to get off to a better start.”
The winner of the match will face top-ranked JMU in the semifinals Friday night. The CAA title will be decided Nov. 13.
Now that they find themselves in the do-or-die postseason setting, Pfeifer said, the Huskies have only one option to keep their season alive: win
“We have to win the tournament,” Pfeifer said. “We just gotta do it one game at a time, so we gotta take care of Delaware on Thursday and we’ll worry about James Madison Thursday when that game’s over, hopefully.”
