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Regardless of how many opportunities a soccer team has, the ball still needs to find the back of the net.
That’s the trouble the No. 14 New Mexico men found themselves in Friday night at the UNM Soccer Complex. The Lobos fired 13 shots at unranked Drake, including six on goal. None made it past the Bulldogs’ redshirt freshman goalie Darrin MacLeod.
Drake took advantage, scoring in the final two and a half minutes and upsetting UNM 1-0. As a result, the Lobos (3-2-1) lost back-to-back games for the first time since 2010.
“It’s not like we played terrible, but we feel gutted because we feel we dominated that game. We should have won,” UNM senior forward Michael Kafari said. “It goes to show that if you don’t take your opportunities, it’ll come back and bite you in the butt.”
Drake’s only shot-on-goal came from senior midfielder Addison Eck. Taking a long ball passed from senior defender Nick Marshall, Eck fired the ball near the Lobo net on a one-touch shot past UNM goalie Michael Lisch. It was Eck’s first goal this season.
The Bulldogs (2-3-2) took four shots in total, exactly as many as UNM senior midfielder Michael Calderon attempted on goal. Senior forward James Rogers tried three shots, with one on goal.
MacLeod made two first-half saves, with the other four stops coming in the latter 45 minutes. Lobo head coach Jeremy Fishbein praised MacLeod for his efforts but said that the UNM team must be able to finish when it is in a position to score.
“We didn’t put the game away,” he said. “We had a lot of chances — good chances. When you’ve got quality attacking players, to win games you have to score goals. They didn’t do it.”
Kafari said the inability to convert goals came from Drake playing compacted on the defensive side, making it difficult to break through.
“It’s so hard to find room in the attacking forward in front of a defender,” he said. “It’s two for one, and it was hard to find our players. Either way, we had our chances. We should have put them away and we paid for not finishing our chances in the first half.”
In 2010, UNM dropped consecutive games twice. The Lobos fell to CSU Bakersfield in the regular-season finale before a loss at Creighton in the NCAA tournament’s first round. Earlier that season, UNM lost back-to-back games at home to Denver and Air Force.
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UNM will try to snap its losing skid tonight when the Lobos play at UC Santa Barbara at 8 p.m. MT. The team is making its first trip to Santa Barbara, Calif. since 1999.
The Lobos hold a 4-3-1 all-time series lead over the Gauchos, a Big West member. In 2010 the teams played to a 1-1 draw. UCSB has a 4-2 record this season after prevailing its last two games over Ivy League teams — a 2-1 win over Penn and a 3-1 victory over Yale.
“We’ll see how we regroup,” Fishbein said. “I know this is a good team. It’s not that we’re ever going to stop being a very good team, but when you’ve got quality players they’ve got to win games. There’s no two ways around it.”
