Soccer Loses to Northern Colorado, Shows Complacency

Complacency really DOES come before calamity...look it up, ISU

ISU Soccer lost to Northern Colorado, 3-1 yesterday in what many described as a flat game for the Bengals. Now, I wasn't at the game because I went to be with my rugby boys in a crucial match versus Utah State (which we won after a great second half of play, 22-12, thereby making us 5-0-1 on the season). But I did talk to a lot of people who were at the game, including Bob Devine (ISU Voice Sportswriter and superhuman soccer master), and what happened was all too predicatable considering this year's edition of the Bengals.

ISU tied the game on a Lauren Ryan goal (her first of the season, 7th of her career) and then, as the website describes, we got very complacent and figured Northern Colorado would roll over (because apparently we're SO intimidating with a 5-7-2 record). One small problem: while we decided to let up, the Bears decided to play like...well, a team that doesn't take things for granted. Quoth Feldmarschall Gibson:

"They fought for everything. They ran through everything, they put pressure on us every time we touched the ball. They were playing 100 percent and we were playing 50 percent...When they would get the ball we would react slowly. They would pass it and we would react, as opposed to seeing the play going up and challenging the player for the ball and that's where we were completely off today."

If you want to check the stats of the game, go to the ISU Website hyah. I would cover them here but there is something that needs to be said about what may turn out to be one of the biggest disappointments at ISU this fall.

I came in this fall seeing a soccer team that was to be one of the best in recent memory. This squad was to be the one to win the conference championship, prove the pollsters wrong (again) and was being looked at as the first team to break through and make a run in the NCAA Tournament. And with a lot of freshmen and sophomores on the squad, this was to be the beginning of a long period of Bengal rule over the Big Sky, ruling it with an iron fist and completely under our heels.

Problem: The squad, from what I could gather over the past 2 and a half months, bought into the hype. Every day I would (and still can) hear the team talking and walking as if they had won the whole thing. We entered games thinking all we had to do was show up and teams would roll over (hence why we seem to start flat all the time). And then a funny thing happened when we showed up to games with that attitude: we lost.

We walk with swagger and talk smack everyday around campus. The issue isn't that, it's that we aren't backing it up on the field. A squad who is 5-7-2 overall and 0-1-1 in conference should not be talking smack at all.

What this team needs more than anything is a wake-up call. We have players who give their all every single game. But a handful of people cannot win a game in any sport. We need everyone playing at the highest level. There is no shame in running up the score, or hitting people as hard as we can. There is no shame in yellow cards, and there is no shame in not showing the fake sportsmanship that the NCAA wants you to show just for the sake of image. We need heart, not talent. We need desire, not swagger. We need to live and breathe soccer, not regard it as something to be used for status. We need to have fun again, forget the on and off-field drama and bullshit, buckle down and play the Beautiful Game.