10 Man Marquette Loses To South Florida

It was an ongoing series of “well, this isn’t going well” for Marquette men’s soccer on Friday night in Tampa before a brief moment of hope and then even that was dashed out. The final score was 2-1 in favor of South Florida, but that doesn’t even come close to explaining what happened in this match.

Things got off on the wrong foot for the Golden Eagles when Victor Claudel scored for the Bulls just past the nine minute mark to take a 1-0 early lead. For the most part, the first half after that was just a soccer match, with USF holding a 1-0 lead and a 9-5 advantage in shots. That’s fine.

Then the second half started, and things got worse. USF owned the first five shots of the frame before Alan Salmeron recorded MU’s first. Off balance to say the least, and things got more difficult for Marquette when Josh Hancock picked up his second yellow card of the match and was thus disqualified.

That was at the 64:32 mark of the match, leaving Marquette to play with 10 men for the final 25 minutes. Things were already twisting away from them, and it got worse from there. USF maintained a healthy possession advantage, marking off four more shots in a row on their way to a 17-4 shot advantage after the intermission.

Then, as things were juuuuust starting to look totally hopeless for Marquette, Alex Mirsberger said “hey, wait a gosh darn minute” and scored his first ever collegiate goal off an assist from Patrick Seagrist. That came in the 79th minute, and since Marquette had already fended off USF for 14 minutes, you could start to think that they might be able to find a way to keep it going to squeeze a draw out of this.

Alas, the Bulls scored just three minutes later.

That was that.

We have to still say it was a strong performance from MU keeper Jackson Weyman, who made eight saves. Half of those came after Hancock was sent off, so that’s quite the performance by the redshirt freshman.

The big non-result news of the match was Luka Prpa subbing into the match in the 34th minute. The all-Big East midfielder missed Marquette’s first two matches of the season while recovering from an injury. He played 49 minutes here, staying on the field through halftime the 63rd minute, and then returning in the 70th to play the remainder of the match. We’ll get a good idea about whether Prpa is 100% back from here on out in MU’s next match as.....

Up Next: ..... Marquette won’t play again for a week. They’ll be back at home for their next contest on Friday, September 13, with Northern Illinois coming to Milwaukee. The Huskies are 0-2-1 on the season so far after a Friday night draw with Green Bay. They’ll visit Dayton this coming Monday before traveling to Wisconsin for Friday’s match.