Patrick Mullins and Sunny Jane
Time after time, the Terrapins men’s soccer team will show flashes of brilliance in tough road contests, but then days later will put its inexperience on display with home losses that fail to cement the Terps as a consistent top-10 team.
It seems whenever the Terps take a step in the right direction, a setback follows. And it happened again last week.
After earning hard-fought draws at Notre Dame on Oct. 8 and Virginia on Oct. 11, the Terps — who will play at Syracuse tomorrow — returned home and put on an offensive clinic at Ludwig Field, dismantling Marshall 5-0 for the team’s second shutout of the season.
The squad hadn’t lost in nine contests, dating back Sept. 8. The defense was starting to gel with midfielder Jereme Raley playing at right back and a four-man rotation at center back — featuring defenders Chris Odoi-Atsem, Suli Dainkeh, Dakota Edwards and Alex Crognale — while the host of talented scoring threats was finally finishing off scoring chances.
But on Oct. 19 against then-No. 15 Wake Forest, the Terps reverted back to the shoddy defensive play from their opening weekend struggles in California. The Demon Deacons scored four goals in the final 25 minutes of the first half and cruised to a 4-3 victory at Ludwig.
“Sometime when you don’t execute, you don’t get punished,” coach Sasho Cirovski said Saturday. “But tonight, we didn’t execute in those last 20 minutes of the first half, and we got severely punished.”
The Terps responded Tuesday night with a defensively strong 1-0 victory over Drexel. Despite considering changes to the backline and midfield, Cirovski opted for a nearly identical starting lineup.
And he was rewarded with his team’s third shutout of the season, which midfielder Sunny Jane won with his first goal of the season in the 77th minute off a cross from forward Patrick Mullins.
Jane, who has been one of Cirovski’s most dynamic scoring threats over his four-year career, struggled to put the ball in the back of the net until Tuesday. The chances were there, but the senior said his inability to score started getting to his head, and he was thinking too much when he had opportunities — so much that Jane said he had to calm himself down before slotting Mullins’ cross into the open net.
“I kind of had to take a deep breath and just slow down because if I was too excited going into it I might have screwed it up like everything else,” Jane said.
With Jane now back on track, the Terps have a plethora of weapons up top that can score goals. Earlier in the season, the Terps, including 2012 MAC Hermann Trophy winner Mullins, struggled mightily to finish scoring chances, despite outshooting nearly every opponent they faced.
Now the 21st-year coach’s focus has shifted to defense. Support from the midfield has stabilized the backline, which has taken pressure off the offense to score three or four goals a game to contend.
The Terps will travel to Syracuse, N.Y., for a conference showdown with the Orange, and they can’t afford another letdown and slip in the national rankings this close to the postseason.
And Cirovski, who last lost four regular season games in 2009, will demand a strong physical performance to avoid defeat.
“That was a nice way to bounce back after some defensive letdowns against Wake Forest,” Cirovski said Tuesday. “We took a giant step forward on the defensive side of the ball.”
