Marquette Men's Soccer Preview: at Wisconsin

Only three teams at Marquette compete head to head in the regular season against Wisconsin: Men's Basketball, Women's Basketball, and Men's Soccer.  Women's Soccer plays a yearly exhibition against the Badgers, but never a regular season match, and Volleyball just doesn't schedule the Red Menace.  The other teams either aren't spots with head to head games or they play sports that UW doesn't sponsor in the case of MU's two lacrosse teams.

That means that today's match against the Badgers in Men's Soccer is one of three yearly chances for Marquette to straight up Beat Bucky.  No living vicariously through others, just a straight up chance to make Wisconsin's players hang their head in the agony of defeat.

With that said, it's not going to be easy to beat Wisconsin here, and I don't mean that in the coach-speak "we have to play smart and not make any mistakes" kind of way.  I'm talking about MU's current four game winless streak.  As not fun as that is on its own, it's actually worse than that.  With the exception of the Golden Eagles going to a 0-0 draw with St. John's in their Big East opener, Marquette has squandered leads in every game of this current four game path.  They had a lead very late against Northern Illinois before losing in overtime, they had leads at two different occasions against Notre Dame, and they were just 40 seconds away from heading to halftime with a lead against Villanova.  Against Villanova, Marquette had almost made it to intermission with a 1-0 lead before Sean Sheridan scored one and helped out on another to had Marquette their first big East loss of the season.  Good news: Offense!  Bad news: not having enough offense to win and/or the defense squandering the leads.

Match #10: at Wisconsin (2-7-1, 1-1-1 Big Ten)

When: Wednesday, October 7, 2015, at 7pm Central
Where: McClimon Soccer Complex in Madison, WI
Audio/Visual: Video streaming will be available through BTN+ if you're a subscriber, plus there's live stats.
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteSoccer

I'd like to be able to say that someone is coming away from this match with the end of a winless streak, but I can't, because that's how soccer goes.  There's a chance this thing ends in a draw and thus Wisconsin will extend their four match winless streak.  Their two wins on the season came back to back, at Rutgers and at St. John's, and it's been nothing but losses and a tie since then.  Two of the losses are not explainable by playing high quality competition, either.  A school like Wisconsin generally speaking shouldn't be losing to SIUE and Green Bay at home, although dropping a game to #11 Maryland isn't the worst thing ever.

Their most recent match was a 3-3 draw at Michigan, and that match comprises a full one-quarter of all of the goals that Wisconsin has scored this season.  The Badgers are getting outshot on the season to the tune of nearly five shots a match, and they're getting outscored by nearly a goal per match, too.  Sophomore midfielder Christopher Mueller leads the Badgers in goals this season with three, which is still a quarter of all of their goals.  This is actually kind of impressive, because Mueller's only played about two-thirds of the minutes this season, and also because those three markers are the only three goals of his collegiate career.

The Badgers are on their third starting keeper of the season.  They started with Casey Beyers, who started the first two matches, but was yanked after giving up a second goal against Xavier in that second match.  He was replaced by Adrian Remeniak in that match, but it was Connor Revsbeck that started against Santa Clara and UC Davis.  After those two contests turned up as losses, the starting job went around the bend to Remeniak.  I'm not sure why Revsbeck got the nod over Remeniak, given that Remeniak was the backup for Beyers, but hey, that's how it goes.

Remeniak has started the last six matches, and the Badgers are 2-3-1 with him playing full matches.  His stats aren't good, though, as he's allowing just short of two goals every 90 minutes, and he's only stopping 66% of shots on goal.