ST. LOUIS “”mdash; Sophomore Jason Leopoldo didn’t want to
get up.
Instead, he remained seated in disbelief at midfield after time
ran out.
Whoever could hold back the tears in the locker room, did. Those
who couldn’t buried their heads.
In a heartbreakingly close contest, eighth-seeded UCLA watched
unseeded UCSB celebrate its first men’s soccer national title
with a 2-1 victory in the championship game of the College Cup.
“It just hurts,” senior Kiel McClung said.
“There’s no other way to put it; it just
hurts.”
The game came down to the final seconds, with UCLA creating
multiple chances to equalize, but the Bruins couldn’t find
the back of the net to push the game into overtime.
It looked as if the Bruins were going to come back from a 2-0
deficit when Leopoldo scored in the 79th minute, making it a
one-goal game and giving the Bruins hope.
“After
the goal I scored, I thought we had some momentum, more than
we’d had the whole game,” Leopoldo said. “I
definitely thought we’d get the second goal, but it
didn’t come today.”
The Bruins will likely remember several late opportunities for
the second goal that slipped away.
Freshman Kyle Nakazawa took a free kick in the 86th minute that
was inches away from finding the foot of an open Sean Alvarado at
the back post, UCSB goalkeeper Kyle Reynish made a diving stop on a
free kick from defender Mike Zaher to deflect it to the side of the
goal, and another UCLA shot deflected off of a UCSB player on the
goal line and went over the bar.
With UCSB’s first-ever national title in men’s
soccer, the Gauchos keep the Bruins at 99 NCAA team titles.
“We would have loved to have been the team that achieved
that goal (of 100 titles),” UCLA coach Jorge Salcedo said.
“If we would have won, that would have been great, but
unfortunately we’re not (the team to do it).”
The Gauchos broke two streaks Sunday. They are the first
unseeded team since Connecticut in 2000 to take the championship,
and they beat the Bruins for the first time since Oct. 30, 1982.
The last time the two teams faced each other, at UCSB on Oct. 5,
UCLA won 3-1.
While the Santa Barbara team came out looking stronger than it
did in the Gauchos’ semifinal game, UCLA was the exact
opposite. The team from Westwood had a hard time getting into any
kind of a rhythm in the early going.
“We didn’t have a good game today, and it’s a
bad day to play a poor game,” Salcedo said.
UCSB wasted no time in getting the lead it would never
relinquish. In the third minute of the match, midfielder Tyler
Rosenlund created space along the touchline and found forward Nick
Perera in front of the goal mouth. Perera capitalized on the
opportunity to put the Gauchos up 1-0.
UCSB would continue to put loads of pressure on UCLA in the
first half, totaling eight shots to the Bruins’ three, and
controlled the pace and character of the game to its advantage.
“We (normally) like to play around teams,” Zaher
said. “(But) they started dumping the ball, so we got excited
and started dumping the ball. I mean, they have Andy Iro and some
big guys back there versus David Estrada and Nakazawa. The air
battle was to our disadvantage.”
It was a combination of good defense and a lot of luck that kept
the difference at just one goal going into the half. With the
Gauchos pressuring for a second goal, Zaher went horizontal and
vertical to volley the ball out and stop a possible one-on-one.
The best defender in the half, however, might not have had a
jersey on. The left post was UCLA’s best friend in the first
half, with two shots from Rosenlund skimming along the ground and
hitting off the post and out.
On offense, the Bruins, playing into the Gauchos’ style,
had only one shot on goal in the first half. While the Bruins owned
the second half against Virginia on Saturday, scoring four goals en
route to the win, the Gauchos were the team that came out firing
first in the second half on Sunday. With numbers on a counterattack
in the 61st minute, Gaucho sophomore Eric Avila had an open shot
from 14 feet out and put the ball past goalkeeper Eric Reed into
the left side of the goal, giving UCSB a 2-0 advantage.
Sunday’s championship match was the first game in the NCAA
Tournament in which UCLA failed to score three goals, a total that
would have given the Bruins the win. The Bruins were pressing for
the equalizer literally into the final minute of play, until a
Gaucho free kick put the ball deep into their territory with under
10 seconds left.
After the game, the UCLA players sat in the locker room,
mentally and physically exhausted and frustrated to come so close
to their goal and have to settle for first runner-up.
“To work this hard and play that many games to get second
place (is) not what we wanted,” Alvarado said.