The members of the men’s soccer team are crowding up the
training room. In the opening minutes of UCLA’s 3-1 loss at
Cal on Friday, last week’s consensus National Player of the
Week Maxwell Griffin went down with a torn ACL and is out for the
season.
“(It was the) first three minutes of the game,
actually,” midfielder Greg Folk said. “(Someone) played
a ball onto his feet. He just checked away from his defender and
when he went to go pass the ball he just toppled over.”
The sophomore had been the answer to the Bruins’
goal-scoring woes, leading the team with 5 goals and 11 points.
Coach Jorge Salcedo said he will look to the team’s assist
leader, Sal Zizzo, to get more goals of his own now that Griffin is
on the sideline.
“At this point Sal Zizzo is someone that we’re
hoping can step up to score goals for us,” Salcedo said.
“He’s our second-leading goal scorer, with only two
goals, playing at midfield. Unfortunately, he has the injury bug as
well right now.”
In practice, Zizzo sustained a knee injury trying to keep a ball
from going out of bounds.
“I had a little incident with a bleacher,” Zizzo
said. “The ball went out and I tried to save it. And then I
stopped on the concrete right here and slid and my knee banged into
it.”
The Bruins will also be without sophomore Tony Beltran, who left
the game against Cal after an ankle injury flared up. Beltran will
have surgery on the ankle Friday and is expected to be out for 6 to
8 weeks.
Salcedo noted it was a tough call on whether or not to play
Beltran, who was in the game for 20 minutes before coming out.
The long stream of medical issues started in the spring, when
defender Brandon Owens went down with his own ACL injury.
Salcedo commented that Owens, who has been on the road to
recovery, could run straight, but was not yet back to making
cuts.
The Bruins have been without Owens and defender Edwige Ligonde
all season, lost freshman Robert Georgiefski against LMU during the
first scrimmage of the year, and now have to go without two more
players in Griffin and Beltran.
“Those five guys are all contributing players, if not four
of them starters,” Salcedo said.
The Bruins, who were already on the young side, will likely
become even more so in the coming weeks in order to respond to the
loss of so many players.
“Injuries come with the sport,” Folk said. “We
just gotta have some younger guys step up into their
roles.”