In the NCAA men’s soccer tournament, one bad game or one unlucky bounce in the box could immediately end a team’s season. This is especially the case in overtime, when the first team to score automatically wins and advances to the next round.
“You need that little bit of luck,” said redshirt senior goalkeeper Earl Edwards before UCLA’s first NCAA tournament game this past Sunday.
Over the past two years, UCLA men’s soccer has been short on luck and mostly on the wrong side of pivotal bounces.
Since the start of last season, the Bruins have been in 15 overtime games. Prior to last weekend, they were 2-4-8 in those games, with their last golden goal coming against San Diego on Sept. 15, 2013.
But last Sunday, that drought ended. No. 2-seeded UCLA got a golden goal – by way of senior midfielder Leo Stolz – in the second round of the NCAA tournament, allowing the team to advance past unseeded San Diego and onto the No. 15 seed Cal in the third round this Sunday.
The Bruins’ first game of the 2014 NCAA tournament was the antithesis of their last game in the 2013 tournament, which they lost 5-4 in penalty kicks. In that game, UCLA had a 2-0 lead early on, and lost it by early in the second half. Against USD this past Sunday, the Bruins trailed 1-0 in the first half but came back and won. The comeback win was a small sign of the resilience that UCLA has developed over the past year.
“I think we’ve matured as a team a lot, from the loss last year, like over winter, spring and now throughout the fall,” said sophomore midfielder/forward Gage Zerboni before the playoffs.
The Bruins will get another chance to show their development this weekend, when they face arguably their biggest nemesis of the season in the Golden Bears. Cal is a perfect 2-0 against UCLA this season and the only team to defeat the Bruins twice this year.
But if past is prologue, this matchup is just what UCLA wants.
The Bruins’ second-round game against the Toreros was a reprise of a match that UCLA had lost earlier in the season. Freshman forward Abu Danladi called the rematch a “revenge game,” and the Bruins came out and conquered their former defeater with a golden goal.
Now, after Cal defeated UCLA on a botched ball by Edwards the last time around, the Bruins will have a chance to make the ball bounce in their favor.
“(We need to) prepare as much as possible, and leave nothing up to chance,” Edwards said prior to the playoffs.