Men’s Soccer Escapes With A Draw

The Golden Eagles caught two major breaks while going to a scoreless duel with Purdue Fort Wayne.

There’s good news and bad news from Marquette men’s soccer’s 0-0 draw with Purdue Fort Wayne on Thursday afternoon.

The good news is, of course, they did not lose. They didn’t win, which is kind of bad news, but Not Losing is still good news.

The bad news is that they couldn’t find a goal even though the Golden Eagles outshot the Mastodons 8-2 after the first half ended with both teams recording four shots each.

The worse news is that Marquette absolutely should have lost this game.

The first reason why is the foul assessed to Gabriel Rokov in the 17th minute. From watching the match live on FloSports, it certainly looked like Rokov just planted himself in front of the PFW attacker in the box and just stood there until both men fell down. There wasn’t an attempt at a tackle, and Rokov was pretty stationary for a good long time. I’m not saying that it’s not possible that smaller things weren’t happening to knock down the Purdue Fort Wayne guy, I’m saying I’ve seen much worse things get whistled for a penalty kick than this.

But VAR held up the call, so who am I to judge?

You’ll notice that I already told you the match ended without a goal, and YUP, 6’7” freshman Martin Brink leapt to his right and made the save on the PK.

The second reason — yes, there’s a second reason why Marquette absolutely should have lost this match — came in the second half. I’ll say this much: Someone messed up in the live stats, because there should be a notation of this and there’s not. Thankfully, I mentioned the time when posting on Bluesky about VAR wiping away a Purdue Fort Wayne goal on an offside call in the 56th minute. Thank goodness, too. It was a pretty rough look for Marquette, as PFW just bonked the ball away from behind out towards the front of the goal, and ZOOP, in the back of the net.

But rules are rules, and even though I suspect that because the on field official didn’t make the offside call live, it was one of the offside calls that is ruining the sport, well, gosh darn it, we gotta adhere to the rules and VAR says PFW was offside. No goal!

All told, freshman netminder Marten Brink made five saves for his third shutout of the season. That lowers his goals-against average to just 0.60 through 450 minutes, and it raises his save percentage to .875 on 24 shots on goal.

Up Next: Marquette will take their 3-1-1 record on the road on Monday evening. They’ll be taking a short jaunt south on I-94 to Evanston, Illinois, to face Northwestern. The Wildcats are 4-0-0 so far this season and are currently ranked #9 in the country. They’ll tangle with #4 Western Michigan in Kalamazoo on Friday afternoon before hosting the Golden Eagles, so maybe they’ll have already taken one loss by the time we get there.