Men's Soccer Stands on Thin Ice

What a difference two weeks makes.

After losing its first contest of the season, a 1-0 grudge match with Vermont, the Harvard men’s soccer team went on a tear. Going unbeaten in its next five games, it had its sights firmly set on a conference title.

What have followed are four straight losses, two of which have come to Ivy opponents. Now the Crimson (4-5-1, 0-2 Ivy) is set to face Brown (7-3-1, 2-0) tomorrow, and if the game is anything like last year’s matchup, Harvard is poised to turn its season around. Last season, the Crimson topped the Bears on a game-winning goal with 52 seconds left, and it may need more crunch-time heroics if it wants a shot at conference supremacy come mid-November.

“We’re still in the picture mathematically, but it’s going to take some very good games from us,” captain Will Craig said.

To have a realistic shot at the Ivy League championship, Harvard will most likely have to win the rest of its games. The toughest of those might easily be against Brown, a team who, along with Penn, leads the Ivy League with seven wins. But a victory against the Bears would mean more than just another notch in the win column.

“Beating Brown this weekend would be huge,” Craig said. “They’re definitely our biggest rival in the Ivy League, and if we could beat them to start this last stretch of the season, I think we’d be on our way.”

Beating the Bears could help shape the Crimson’s season long after the final whistle is blown at Ohiri Field tomorrow afternoon. Last year’s 1-0 last-second triumph served as a bit of a spark for the team, and it would love to do it again.

“We thought that game was going into overtime, but Nick [Tornaritis] picked up the ball at half, dribbled and scored from about eighteen feet out,” Craig said. “We were all going crazy, and that was one of the best games we’d played in.”

In order to compete with a Brown squad which has already posted five shutouts this season, Harvard will have to bring its offensive muscle—something that hasn’t been much of a problem the majority of the year.

What has hurt the team lately has been the defensive effort. The last three games have resulted in ten goals against the Crimson, while the team only yielded six goals in the first seven games combined.

“The teams we’ve been playing lately have been tough, and they’ve been bringing a lot of pressure,” senior goalie Ryan Johnson said. “We have some young guys who we’re bringing up who can hopefully get us back to where we were at the start of the season.”

Others on the team share this sentiment regarding the development of previously inexperienced underclassmen in the defensive backfield.

“We’ve had to adjust since the beginning of year because of injuries and having people play in spots they aren’t familiar with,” Craig said. “We lost our focus, so we need to get back to doing what we did right.”

Getting back to early-season form means finishing games strong. Two of Harvard’s last three losses have come in the last minute or overtime. The Crimson fell to Cornell 3-2 thanks to a Big Red goal with only 37 seconds left, and allowed four unanswered goals in a 4-3 overtime loss to the Rams.

“When we can keep possession, it makes the defense’s job a lot easier,” Johnson said.

Harvard finishes the season against Penn, but the finale is still about a month away, and with that in mind, the Crimson’s focus is firmly on the Bears—and ruining the chances of any Ivy contender it comes across afterwards.

“You can’t look too far ahead,” Craig said. “That said, it’s always fun to spoil it for other teams.”