Eastern men’s soccer is looking to bounce back this Thursday against the Liberty University Flames after an unsuccessful road trip to Texas.
The Panthers lost both games of their road trip 4-2 against Incarnate Word and 4-1 against Houston Christian.
“I think our emotions are better than they should be after not getting the results we needed on the road in Texas, but that just shows how we’re able to come back off a poor result and look forward to forward to the next game,” freshman defender Lance Somerfield said.
In 11 games the Panthers have only scored in the second half twice, two goals against Lindenwood and one goal against Bradley. Defensively Eastern’s opponents scored 12 out of their 20 goals in the second half. In their last two games they have allowed six goals in the second half, three against Incarnate Word and three against Houston Christian, and they haven’t scored any goals in the second half.
“Recently we haven’t been playing a full 90,” fifth year senior defender Maxwell Allen said. “We’ve played a good 60 minutes and then 30 minutes we check out so if we play to our potential for the full 90 minutes, I know we can pull out three points.”
Eastern has also allowed five goals off of dead balls. Dead balls are any time the ball is not in play which includes free kicks, corner kicks, penalty kicks and throw-ins.
“I think these next two weeks we’re going to get a healthy dose of dead balls,” Head Coach Josh Oakley said. “That goes two ways, defending dead balls, which we need to be much better at, and also working something and conjuring up good situations out of corner kicks and free kicks. I think the biggest one there is the free kicks from outside of shooting range. We need to do a much better job on that.”
Liberty comes into this game at 7-4 and 2-2 in the Ohio Valley Conference. Liberty has lost their last two games 2-0 against Chicago State and SIUE.
“I’m confident in how we’re going to do” freshman defender Jake McConnery said. “Liberty’s not too hot right now so I’m hoping we’re going to take advantage of that.”
Oakley said that Liberty is going to be an angry team coming off of two games with no goals.
“Our conference is very, very, very, very competitive top to bottom and this team Liberty are going to be very, very, very upset,” Oakley said. “So, we’re going to get the absolute best Liberty team that has played. They’ve played 11 or 12 games; this will be the best game they’ve played so we know we’re going to get a test and we’re ready for it.”
Luther Yoder can be reached at 581-2812 or at lyoder@eiu.edu.
