The men’s soccer team will look to rebound from last week’s heartbreaking overtime loss to Penn when it hosts No. 19 Yale tomorrow evening on Berman Field. Yale (5-1-0, 0-0-0 Ivy) has historically offered the Red (3-2-1, 0-1-0) challenging matches, so head coach Bryan Scales expects a battle.
“Yale is a good team,” he said. “They have a lot of team speed, they’re dangerous at a lot of different positions. Our guys need to come out and compete.”
Cornell enters tomorrow’s match-up coming off a double-overtime 2-1 loss to Penn at home last Saturday. The game was a tight, well-played affair, particularly in the second half and overtime. The play of the goalkeepers, senior Doug Allan and Penn’s Matthew Haefner stood out as highlights of the game.
“In all honesty, we were a little unlucky to lose that game,” reflected Scales. “We had chances to win it. The performance — especially in the second half and the overtime, I thought was pretty good.”
Yale lost its first game of the year on Wednesday, falling 1-0 to No. 24 Hofstra. The Elis averaged 2.8 goals per game in its five wins to open the season, including one against defending national champion North Carolina.
To prepare for Yale, Scales implored his troops to regroup and put the past week’s disappointment behind them in order to move forward.
“In training this week, we just got back to some fundamentals and made sure that [the players] understand that every game is different, and they can’t dwell on what happened last week. They have to just start preparing for what’s in front of them,” Scales said.
In 2001, Cornell and Yale battled to a 0-0 tie in the Ivy opener in New Haven. Yale was without top threat Jay Alberts in that game, a factor that the Red will have to contend with tomorrow.
“All these Ivy League games are close games,” said Scales. “There’s one or two plays each game that determine how the outcome goes. We hope that we can force Yale to make some mistakes. We hope that we can get after them and imprint our style and personality on the game.”
The forecast calls for temperatures in the low 50s for tomorrow night, which may have a slight effect on the fluidity of the play, but Scales feels that both teams are well prepared for low temperatures and that should not be a factor.
“That’s not going to be a big deal for either team,” he said.
Archived article by Owen Bochner