The margin for error in soccer is perhaps the narrowest of any team sport. One shot, one bounce or one penalty can make all the difference.
"It's a funny game in that regard," Penn men's soccer coach Rudy Fuller likes to say, something he repeated after last Saturday's match with Columbia.
But neither Fuller nor his team was laughing once 90 minutes were up at Rhodes Field and the Lions walked off the field with a 2-1 victory.
Despite winning the possession and stat-sheet battles - the Quakers (7-2-3, 1-1-0 Ivy) had 11 corner kicks to Columbia's zero and outshot the Lions by a 15-4 margin - the Red and Blue made a pair of critical mistakes that cost them.
"It's a cruel game," Fuller said in an amendment of his earlier statement.
In the final minute of the first half, the Lions (3-6-1, 1-1-0) earned a restart kick in the corner of Penn's zone. The ball was cleared out the other side, leaving Columbia with a long throw-in, which skimmed across the box to senior Scott Strickland. He pushed it through traffic and past Penn keeper Drew Healy to put Columbia ahead, 1-0.
"Anytime a goal is scored right before or after the half, that's tough to deal with," Fuller said. "Their goal really dulled our 44 minutes of good play."
Compounding the pain for the Quakers was the manner in which the goal was scored - due to their size, the Red and Blue have usually done well defending long throws.
"It was really unfortunate for us to have a mental lapse like that," senior midfielder Alex Grendi said.
A halftime speech by Fuller and some of the seniors rejuvenated Penn. Yet the Lions came out of the break still riding high off the momentum of their first goal.
Instead of getting complacent and playing defensively, Columbia started to pressure the Quakers more than in the first half, giving them less space and less time on the ball.
It paid off. The Quakers, getting more desperate as more time bled off, aggressively pushed up their back line. Lions forward Bayo Adafin - the lone man up top in their 5-4-1 formation and the third-leading scorer in the Ivy League - slipped behind Penn defender Ryan Porch, got one-on-one with Healy and fired a shot past him for the unassisted breakaway goal.
Porch got one back in the 84th minute, using all of his 6-foot-4 frame to head in a throw-in from Zach Barnett. But it was too little, too late, as the Quakers failed to take advantage of a home match against a Columbia squad that had only scored seven goals prior to Saturday.
"We knew what we had to do and we didn't do it," Porch said.
The defeat is devastating for Penn, which has lost two in a row after going undefeated through the first 10 matches of the season. In a tight Ivy League race, the Quakers can't afford to drop another one.
"We're really pissed off," Grendi said. "Going forward now, we have to win out."
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