For 89 minutes and 43 seconds on Saturday afternoon, Marquette and Providence played to a standstill in men’s soccer. Sure, the Friars had a 16-10 advantage on shots, but Luis Barraza had made six first half saves while PC had a 10-2 shot margin, and MU actually held an 8-6 advantage after halftime.
It looked an awful lot like the two teams were going to head to extra time deadlocked in a scoreless tie, which would be the second straight match with that happening for the Golden Eagles.
Except.....
Marquette committed a foul, their 20th of the game, thus surrendering a free kick for the Friars. Joao Serrano’s boot found the head of Gil Santos, bada bing, bada boom, Providence leads 1-0 with 16 seconds to play.
Match over, essentially.
Oh, wait, not entirely over. Senior defender Steffen Bohm still found time for his second yellow card of the match, so he’ll be suspended for Marquette’s next match. I can’t tell you exactly what happened because LOL I’m not paying for a month of Providence All-Access with the hope that the video stream works for the one thing I want to see, but there’s no way that Bohm should have been doing anything resembling anything worthy of a card with 15 seconds left needing to score a goal immediately to force overtime.
As mentioned earlier, the result is especially depressing given the stellar performance of Luis Barraza. He made 10 saves total in the match to give Marquette as much of a chance to win as he could. Some of them were particularly highlight reel-ish, so let’s give you the clips, thanks to the MU soccer Twitter.
17' | Nifty heel flick by Santos, but @luisbarrazaa there to make the stop and this one remains scoreless!
— Marquette Soccer (@marquettesoccer) October 6, 2018
0-0 pic.twitter.com/6PmA1O42kL
42' | Another impressive save for @luisbarrazaa! Shielded on the play, Barraza makes the split-second adjustment to keep this match scoreless late in the first half.
— Marquette Soccer (@marquettesoccer) October 6, 2018
0-0 pic.twitter.com/FP7XgWgYXj
51' | There he goes again! @luisbarrazaa with his 7th save of the day. pic.twitter.com/kCWWdYNHLU
— Marquette Soccer (@marquettesoccer) October 6, 2018
UGH.
Marquette’s offense is just not helping out Barraza lately. The Golden Eagles have not scored a goal since Patrick Seagrist’s late strike against Milwaukee, pushing the streak out past 380 minutes. To make it worse, Marquette has been outshot 63-40 over the last four matches. It’s not that the offense isn’t putting goals on the board to make Barraza’s life easier, it’s that the offense isn’t even maintaining possession long enough to at least keep the shooting totals at least even. It’s first halves that have been hurting Marquette the most, as was the case in this one, with MU getting outshot 35-12 in the first 45 minutes in the last four outings.
With the loss, Marquette is now 3-7-1 on the season and 1-2-1 in Big East play. Those four points have the Golden Eagles in a three-way tie for the sixth and final spot in the Big East tournament with five matches left to be played.
Up Next: The good news about the final five matches of the season is that three of them will be at Valley Fields. That will be the case for the next contest, which will feature St. John’s coming to Milwaukee this coming Saturday. The Red Storm are 6-4-1 overall and 2-1-1 in Big East matches after a 3-1 loss at home to #8 Creighton on Saturday night. They’ll host Princeton on Tuesday before making their way to Wisconsin for the weekend.