By Chris Judd and Jake Fischer, News Staff
Men’s soccer coach Brian Ainscough pulled no punches in criticizing his team’s play Saturday, in a 1-0 loss to Stony Brook that saw the huskies fall to a 3-4-3 record.
“There were no positives today,” head coach Brian Ainscough said. “We chased the game like a high school team, knocking the ball along, and we just kept trying to conjure up anything but our build-up play. [It] was awful today.”
The Huskies held a slight advantage in shots (12-10) and corner kicks (9-6) but could not put the ball in the net. The Huskies have now scored six goals in their last six games.
Senior Dante Marini looked like he had a chance to score an early goal, as he took a long pass and ran through the middle of the field. The defense knocked him off the ball and freshman Marc Greenblatt shot the ball over the crossbar. The Huskies got consecutive corner shots a minute later, but could not score.
Freshman forward Robbie Schallmo had the first shot on goal in the tenth minute off a pass from Marini. However, goalie Carlos Villa made the save for Stony Brook.
The first half ended with Stony Brook having a 6-5 shot advantage, while the Huskies had a 5-3 advantage in corner kicks.
Northeastern had a chance to take a lead in the 64th minute when junior Donovan Fayd’Herbe de Maudave tried to set up a cross, but no one could recover it.
Stony Brook scored the only goal of the game two minutes later off a Northeastern turnover. Stony Brook charged upfield and Will Casey scored his fourth goal of the season by heading the ball to the right side of the net past sophomore goalie Dylan Faber.
“Our expectations were to be a little further along than we are now, but we understand that every game is really difficult,” Ainscough said. “We have to minimize our mistakes. In the past we’ve minimized our mistakes, tonight we made another blunder in the back and from Dylan’s ball out, which normally he wouldn’t do, and we paid a price. Every time we make a mistake, we seem to pay a price, but keep clean sheets is what we’ve lived by in the past.”
The Huskies responded by moving junior Simon Cox to forward to try to generate some offense.
“You’re never set on your lines when you’re chasing a game,” said Ainscough. “We’ll only be set when we get into a pattern of wins. That makes it easy to pick your starting 11. We’re in a little bit of a roller coast of wins and losses at the moment, so you’re always second guessing and changing.”
Faber made a diving save to deflect the ball above the crossbar in the 73rd minute to keep it a one score game.
The Huskies best chance at tying the game came in the 80th minute when junior John Eckford had a clean shot from 27 yards out that the goalie was just able to deflect out of bounds.
The Huskies stayed on offense for the rest of the game but were unable to score on the Stony Brook defense.
The Huskies start conference play next week with a road game against James Madison University (3-3-1) on Sunday.
“We had a rough start in our pre-conference games,” Faber said. “You can’t mess up in the conference games. It’s important to win our first game and get some energy. We haven’t been as sharp as we want to be.”
Although the Huskies feel that they got off to a slow start, they still have a lot of the talent that took them to the NCAA tournament last year. They’re going into the most important part of their schedule with seven conference games to play.
“The most important thing right now is to start each game with confidence and play a full 90 minutes,” Faber said. “We need to play our game, tempo and plan. When we play our plan, we can pass around with anyone.”
