Marquette Women’s Soccer Continues To Struggle In Loss Against BYU

Friday night’s power outage at Valley Fields ended up being a metaphor for what happened to Marquette women’s soccer on Saturday afternoon. With power restored, the match against BYU that was scheduled for Friday was played on Saturday afternoon in the daylight, but the Golden Eagles had no energy. They were outshot 19-6 as BYU won easily, 3-0.

Marquette is now 1-6-1 on the season with one non-conference match left before Big East play begins on September 23rd.

BYU was leading 1-0 and had eight total shots in the match before Abby Hess put a solid boot to one to record MU’s first official shot in the 34th minute. That sentence is pretty much an explanation of the entire match. Marquette looked lackluster and unfocused for pretty much the whole 90 minutes and earned the wrath of assistant head coach (and former MU player, it should be noted) Ashley Bares after the match. Here’s Bares’ quotes to the Marquette Wire following the match, as head coach Markus Roeders was suspended for earning a red card in the 90th minute of Marquette’s 2-1 win over Drake:

“The team is trying to figure out what they need to do to come together and start playing as a whole unit and put together a 90-minute game,” assistant coach Ashley Bares said. “Because right now they’re not doing that.”

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“Right now it needs to be be team-driven,” Bares said. “We’re in a situation we haven’t been in … It’s obviously quite humbling.”

“The (players) need to figure it out for themselves as well,” Bares continued. “Ultimately they’re the ones on the field. They need to do some searching and get on the same page.”

That’s about as unvarnished of an opinion that you’re going to get from a coach following a game, win or lose.

She’s also not wrong about anything.

At their best, Markus Roeders’ teams have always looked like, well, teams. There was always a certain amount of intuition and coherence that derived from that intuition. MU has looked disorganized and out of position over and over in 2018. The biggest thing that jumps out to me is passes that just go nowhere. Not intercepted by the opponent, that would be a different issue. These are passes that are pushed out where no one in particular is on the receiving end. They either end in Marquette awkwardly maintaining possession or the other team running into the open space to gain possession. It’s really not great. Is there a magic fix for any of this? Probably not, especially not eight matches in.

The question now becomes whether this is a squad that can squeeze enough points out of conference action to be able to finish in the top six and qualify for the Big East tournament.

Up Next: Marquette will play their second straight rescheduled match coming up on Monday night. They’ll host Milwaukee (7-0-0), who have run their undefeated streak out to 27 straight matches, after the originally scheduled meeting was postponed from August 26th.