Friday, October 02, 2009
Anxious moments for RU soccer
Ray Cox covers recreational, high school and college sports in the New River Valley. If you have information you’d like featured,
e-mail ray.cox@roanoke.com or call 381-1672
Ray Cox
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College sports fans are a predictable lot. They like for the weather to be nice, the scoring to be high (as long as the good guys are doing it), and the picnic basket and cooler to be full to the brim.
There's nothing you can do about the climate or what goes on in the competitive arena, but you can pack a heck of a tailgate spread no matter what sport is being contested.
The fare will vary with the season. This being early fall, college soccer season, so here's a short list of what to pack should you be heading out to cheer on Radford University's men on the pitch:
You'll need light sorts or foods, low on fat, grease and spice. Stay away from anything that may upset a tummy that will be churning minutes after the first foot has met with ball.
Avoid, at all costs, any sort of adult beverages -- too much potential for erratic behavior and misplaced emotion.
Forget the sodas; too much caffeine. Don't even think about anything that could spark or aggravate an ulcer.
Milk should be all right as long as it's skim (avoid that fat, remember?).
Water's better.
You'll need the water for the last item you should be packing, and that would be anxiety medication.
The question you have to ask yourself, Radford rooter, is how much excitement can you stand while still maintaining optimum health, both physical and mental?
This year's Highlanders don't seem to be fully engaged until somebody among their supporters starts to hyperventilate.
Things have been close for Radford so far in this 2-4-1 campaign. If Highlanders soccer were a barber shop, all it would offer would be buzz cuts.
Everything's close.
A two-goal margin is a blowout.
The Highlanders have scored once in their past six outings, and that was the difference in the 1-0 triumph over East Tennessee State on Sept. 11. The five other games consisted of four losses and a scoreless tie for the low-scoring Highlanders.
Get this, though.
Radford gave up a puny seven goals in six games and lost five of them. A zip-zip tie at Big South Conference rival Liberty two weeks ago was the other result in that string.
Give it to Spencer Smith's Highlanders, though. They're not ducking anybody. The most recent guest at Cupp Stadium was No. 5 North Carolina on Tuesday. The count was 2-love, Tar Heels. It was the fourth goal-free game in a row for Radford.
One strategy sometimes employed by an underdog in a match against a team with superior firepower is to pack the defensive end and hope the other team finds creative and refreshing means of screwing things up for themselves.
There was none of that for Radford.
"We wanted to play them straight up," said forward Brendan Shaffer, the Highlanders captain as a junior. "We weren't going to sit back or anything. We wanted to go at them and play with them."
After spotting the Heels a 2-0 lead in the first 21 minutes, Radford played them pretty much even the rest of the way.
"We started out pretty slow, but in the second half we played a lot better," Shaffer said. "We finally settled down and started playing with them."
At the time, Smith, who's in his 15th season at Radford, described both of Carolina's goals as "preventable."
Who knows what would have happened had Radford's defensive alignment had been a notch tighter or goal keeper Ryan Taylor was able to swat away couple more shots than the two he reached?
Smith said he loved the way his team played for the last 60 minutes of the game adding an effort like that repeated consistently will eventually produce the desired results.
The Highlanders did have their chances. Sophomore Iyiola Awosika slipped into the heart of the Carolina defense undetected in the middle of the field but couldn't convert the one-on-one.
That was with about 16 minutes gone. Another 14 minutes later, Aldo Macias found Mike Handlin at the Heels goal mouth with a crossing pass, but Handlin air mailed the blast high.
There was a lot of back and forth in the second half with neither team able to seize the initiative.
"You can't win if you can't score goals, and, right now, that seems to be our dilemma," Smith said.
Despite the misfires, Shaffer was among those who took heart in playing a quality opponent on relatively even terms.
"It showed us we're capable of playing with the top teams," he said.
The main thing is being able to play with the teams in the Big South. Radford gets another shot at one of them when it invades Presbyterian on Saturday. Forget it that the one-win Blue Hose had lost five in a row. For Radford, it looks like another opportunity to put somebody's fingernails in jeopardy.
What else is new, though? Smith knows there are no breathers, especially in the league.
"It's going to be a dogfight every week."
