Well, Marquette men’s soccer sure picked a good time to snag their first win of the season.
MU scored four goals on their way to defeating Seton Hall on Saturday to move to 1-5-1 on the season. Now, don’t get me wrong: that’s not great. However, it is great that the Golden Eagles are riding high heading into Tuesday night’s rivalry match against UW-Milwaukee.
The Milwaukee Cup will be contested for the 45th time on Tuesday, and yes, UWM had had the lion’s share of the results in this series that dates back to 1973. The Panthers won the first nine matches against Marquette, holding MU to just three goals in that timeframe. Overall, Marquette is just 11-28-5 against UW-Milwaukee, and yeah, that’s not great.
HOWEVER.
Over the last two decades, things are twisting towards a stalemate. Both Marquette and Milwaukee have won eight times in the past 19 seasons, and the two sides have drawn three times. Since Louis Bennett packed up his office and switched jobs from Milwaukee to Marquette, things have been tilting towards the Golden Eagles. In Bennett’s 12 years running the show at Valley Fields, Marquette has a 4-4-3 record in Milwaukee Cup matches. This includes a win in 2014 and draws each of the past two seasons, which has resulted in the Milwaukee Cup living on the Marquette campus ever since that 2-0 victory.
In fact, if Marquette gets a win or a draw on Tuesday night, it will set a new record for MU’s possession of the cup. The Golden Eagles earned a 1-0 win on September 30, 1998, and then defeated UWM in both of the next two seasons. before falling 2-1 in October of 2001. Marquette has never kept the cup for a fourth consecutive season. It would also become the longest possession streak since MU snapped a UWM streak at four in 2008.
So yeah, it’s a big deal. Hopefully whatever magic Bennett wove on Saturday to engineer a Marquette win continues tonight.
Oh, and this wouldn’t really be a Milwaukee Cup preview if we didn’t include the video of Sebastian Jansson’s buzzer beater game winner against UWM from 2012.
Match #8: at Milwaukee Panthers (3-4-2)
Date: Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Time: 7pm Central
Location: Engelmann Stadium in Milwaukee, WI
Television: Spectrum Sports
Streaming: ESPN3/WatchESPN
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Twitter Updates: @marquettesoccer
PLEASE NOTE: UWM’s own schedule says that the game will be on both Spectrum Sports and ESPN3. It seems unlikely for this to be the case, given the way television rights tend to go. I was able to link to the ESPN page that is supposed to carry the stream, so it seems like that’s a guaranteed source to watch the match.
It’s kind of a good news/bad news season for the Panthers. They have gone 3-1-2 in non-conference matches, which is pretty good. The bad news is that they’re already 0-3-0 in the Horizon League. This UWM team was picked to finish fourth in the league this season after going 5-3-1 in conference action last season and advancing to the Horizon League tournament semifinals before falling in overtime to Illinois-Chicago. They still have six more HL matches ahead of them, but two of them are against squads that were already projected to be better than them coming into the season.
Here’s what they’ve got going for them: 10 different Panthers have combined to score 12 goals this season. With UWM even on goals with their opponents this season, spreading the offense around that much has to be a benefit. Teams can’t key in on one or even two guys if you’re finding multiple ways to put it in the net.
However, UWM is outshooting their opponents like crazy, 158-81. Three guys -- Vuk Latinovich, Evan Conway, and Nick Moon - have combined for 96 of those shots. The goals are coming from all over, but those three dudes are doing a strong majority of the heavy lifting. Marquette’s defense will have their work cut out for them to keep all three of these gents marked for 90 minutes.
Freddy Lorenzen looks to be the man in the net for head coach Kris Kelderman. The 6’1” native of Germany is only a freshman, but hey: UWM has two freshman keepers, two redshirt freshman keepers, and one redshirt sophomore keeper on the roster. Lorenzen has a goals-against average of 1.31, but that’s a product of the defense in front of him. He’s only stopping 64% of shots on frame, so accuracy will be the name of the game for Marquette if they want to keep the Milwaukee Cup in their locker room for another year.