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BY TIMOTHY BERNSTEIN

In print | Published October 1, 2009

“The first loss had to come at some point,” the Swarthmore men’s soccer team must have been thinking, “but did it have to come like this?”

After a scoreless afternoon, long stretches of rain and several near-misses on both sides, Dickinson’s Thomas Parkinson scored on a penalty kick in the seventh minute of overtime play, giving the 12th ranked Red Devils (7-1, 2-0 CC) the 1-0 victory over the No. 9 Garnet (8-1, 2-1 CC) in front of a boisterous crowd of two hundred in Carlisle, Pa.

The penalty that set up the winning goal was called when Garnet midfielder Roberto Contreras IV ’12 was given a red card for illegally handling the ball after goalkeeper David D’Annunzio ’12 had been pulled off the net to save a previous shot. Contreras was sent off, and moments later, visiting Swarthmore was handed its first loss of the season.

Parkinson’s goal broke another streak, as well. To that point, D’Annunzio had not allowed a single goal all season — a total of 501 minutes in which no opponent was able to post a score against the Garnet. D’Annunzio finished with five saves against Dickinson.

“It was a great soccer game,” Swarthmore head coach Eric Wagner said after the game. “Both teams battled hard in crazy weather in front of one of the best crowds I’ve seen at Dickinson, and in the end [Dickinson] deserved the victory. They outplayed us just a little bit there at the end.”

As evidenced by the score, the match turned out to be exactly the kind of physical, grinding contest that was expected — the kind that exhausts the players mentally just as much as physically.

Neither team ever dictated play for an extended period of time; the momentum went back and forth.
“[In the next game], we’re going to try to tackle more creatively,” Wagner said.

The numbers confirm the impression of an evenly matched game. Dickinson held slight edges in saves (6-5), corner kicks (8-5) and fouls (20-19), but led in total shots 17-10, including the only one that ended up mattering.

“It was just a great college soccer game,” Wagner said.

Midfielder Dylan Langley ’10 led the team with three shots, while Morgan Langley ’11 added two.
Following the match, the disappointment was evident, but the players, with nearly no exceptions, maintained a positive outlook on a season very much on the right track.

“This is only a test for us to see how well we can bounce back,” defender Pierre Dyer ’12 said afterwards.

Swarthmore has ample reason to stay positive. Despite the loss, the 7-1 start is its best since 2005 (another 7-1 start), which says a lot in a program that has gotten used to hot streaks early in seasons.

In the last five seasons, the Garnet is a combined 30-7-3 through its first eight games of the season, never going worse than 5-2-1.

Much of this credit, Wagner insists, is owed to the program’s foundation. “We’re a strong team all the way down the roster, and [the fast start] says a lot about how we’ve built the program, and it’s a reason that I think we’ll be competitive for years to come,” Wagner said.

Despite the fact that they lost to a team against whom they have traditionally excelled (the Garnet is 3-1-1 against the Red Devils in the past five years), the team is not particularly worried about that, either.

“[We are] on the cocky side of things, “ Dyer said. “We all know that we will defeat them [if] we play them again this season.”

Maybe that confidence is justified. Swarthmore bounced back to crush Washington (2-7, 0-3 CC) last night by a score of 6-0.

The Garnet will try to start a new winning streak when they return to Clothier Field on Saturday to play Gettysburg College (4-2-2. 1-1 CC). Action will begin at 7 p.m.

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