Marquette Rolls Up Michigan In The Second Half

Abdoul Karim Pare knocked in a pair after halftime on Friday night with an Alex Mirsberger header goal in the middle, and YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles snagged a 3-0 win over Michigan at Valley Fields. That moves Marquette to 3-1-0 on the year.

The first 45 minutes looked like 45 minutes of “Marquette might be the better team here, but they don’t have any goals for that, so ehhh?” The Golden Eagles controlled the shots, 6-2, with four of those turning into saves, as well as the corner kicks, 5-2. But, as you can tell, that scoreboard still said 0-0, so it was going to take some more work.

It didn’t take very much work in the second half, at least not in terms of time taken. Abdoul Karim Pare made an outstanding second effort in transition to score what turned into the match’s game winning goal:

That’s just great work, not just to create the first shot attempt, but to recover to take the second one and put it in as well.

Marquette kept the pressure on, and less than four minutes later, Alex Mirsberger made a heads up play to give the Golden Eagles a 2-0 lead:

You can’t ask for a better looking example of “scoring a goal on a corner kick.” Excellent effort, and quite honestly, that wasn’t Mirsberger’s biggest play of the night. In the 63rd minute, Michigan was on the attack, and the ball made its way past keeper Chandler Hallwood for the first time on the night. But Mirsberger was there to record what goes into the books as a Team Save, knock the ball back out towards midfield, and keep the Wolverines scoreless.

Michigan kept coming, and Hallwood made two more plays, one officially a save, to propel the ball away from his net. The Marquette offense finally got ahold of the ball and started a counter attack. As luck would have it, the ball landed at the feet of Pare again, and here’s what happened:

That’s 3-0 with just under 24 minutes to play. Marquette just needed to play some rock solid defense and carry it through to the end. I don’t know if we can quite say that they did that as Michigan did manage to boot a ball into the net in the 87th minute…. But they were offsides on the play. On one hand, the shot beat Hallwood, but on the other hand, it was an illegal play in the first place.

Still, it ends up counting as a stop for the Golden Eagles, and they needed one more as Michigan generated one final corner kick in the 90th minute. They got it, and that was that.

It goes as the second and third goals of the year for Pare, putting him into a tie with Zyan Andrade for the team lead in goals and two points ahead of Andrade for the MU lead in that department. Hallwood finished with three saves on the evening for the clean sheet as well as to keep his net empty for the second straight game since making his 2022 debut.

Up Next: Something of a quick turnaround for the Golden Eagles is on deck. They’ll be back in action on Monday night for their first road game of the season. It’s not much of a road trip, as they’ll just be going west on I-94 a bit to square off with Wisconsin Badgers, so they’ve got that going for them. First kick at McClimon Soccer Complex is set for 7pm Central. The Badgers are 2-2-0 on the year after beating UAB 2-0 down in Alabama on Friday night.