Syracuse Men’s Soccer Does Enough to Beat UAlbany 1-0

45 minutes into tonight’s match, No. 1 Syracuse and UAlbany were all knotted up at zero. It took some time, but eventually, the ‘Cuse took the lead and ended up holding on to a 1-0 victory. Head coach Ian McIntyre was expecting something exactly like this a tough match against an in-state opponent no matter what the name is.

“It’s very difficult to break down a team that sits behind the ball with nine players.” Coach McIntyre said, “And I look and that’s in no way a slight that I thought they did a good job the game plan wore you know they look to frustrate us and they did for large parts of the game. That’s what you get in these regional matchups and thankfully we found enough to get through this today.”

“It wasn’t our best performance, but we were resilient and our defending.” Defender Gabriel Mikina said on the match. “We knew what was going to happen. They’re going to try to play directly, just like the other midweek games we’ve had. So we stayed on top of that and we scored it. That’s all we needed. The first corner right before just went over my head, I think someone flipped it over and then we won another corner and turned the tables and got to see the exact same thing and we did it and worked out.”

While Syracuse may have wanted a prettier scoreline tonight, a win is a win, and this tough matchup might have actually been the perfect test for what’s to come. On Friday, a top 15 squad in Louisville comes to town.