Rickey Lopez-Espin reacts after scoring the winning goal for the Bluejays Tuesday night. (Spomer/WBR) CLICK TO BUY
The Drake Bulldogs played with fire in the second half, and in the final 11 minutes of their match against the No. 1 ranked Creighton men’s soccer team. They got burned.
Junior midfielder Mueng Sunday scored with 20.5 seconds remaining in the first half to give Drake a 1-0 lead over the Bluejays at halftime. It was their only shot on goal in the entire game up to that point, and they didn’t care if it was their last. The Bulldogs came out in the second half and ignored the attacking third of the field. Instead, they packed 11 men in on the defensive side of the field and turned away chance after chance in the hopes of being the first team this season to knock off the top-ranked Bluejays.
But as Cal State Northridge and Seton Hall found out already this season, these Bluejays have some fight in them. Trailing 1-0 still as the time continued to tick away, Creighton senior midfielder Timo Pitter tied the match in the 79th minute, and sophomore forward Ricky Lopez-Espin scored the game-winner in the 85th minute to give the Bluejays a 2-1 come-from-behind win and move them to 11-0-0 on the season.
“I felt like we had the energy, and we had the man power to turn this game around, it was just a matter of staying patient,” Creighton head coach Elmar Bolowich said. “We knew they would pack it in in the second half, so it was a matter of just being patient and finding your opportunities and capitalizing on them. To the guys’ credit, we brought a lot of energy in the second half, and we kept coming and coming and coming. We reeled off shot after shot after shot, and the keeper kept them in it for a long time. Sooner or later, fortunately for us, the ice broke. Sometimes you have games where you run out of time.”
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See photos of the game from WBR photographer Mike Spomer
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Time was beginning to run out on the Bluejays as Drake kept turning away chances. Creighton out shot Drake, 21-2, in the second half. Their defenders were sliding in to deflect away shots, and junior goalkeeper Darrin MacLeod made eight saves as the Creighton tried to fight the frustration, the clock, and the Drake defense.
“It’s really hard because you keep looking at the time, and you’re just thinking, ‘we gotta score, we gotta score,'” Pitter said. “On the other hand you have to stay calm, play around the defense, and keep them moving. It’s a great challenge, but I think we did pretty good.”
Pitter tied the match at 1-1 with 11:19 remaining when he took a shot that was blocked, but luckily it deflected right back to him, and he made the second attempt count, putting the ball in the back of the net from just outside the goal box.
“I just hustled and was lucky to get another shot off,” he said. “It was kind of instinct, I didn’t think too much.”
After Pitter’s equalizer, Drake opened up more and tried to get a second goal, but Creighton already had the momentum from playing on the Bulldogs’ side of the field for the majority of the last 30 minutes. They kept attacking and that’s when Ricky Lopez-Espin found himself in the right place at the right time.
In the 85th minute, Creighton senior midfielder Fernando Castellanos fired a shot on goal from the right side of the goal box. MacLeod dove to his left and punched the shot away. Bluejays senior center back Vincent Keller corralled the deflection and fed Lopez-Espin in the goal box, who turned and fired a strike with his right foot that found the back of the net for his second goal of the season. After watching the goal, the sophomore from Miami, Florida raced towards the left corner of the field, discarded his shirt along the way.
He earned a yellow card for the action, one he said afterwards was the best one he has ever been booked for since it came on the game-winning goal to keep the top-ranked Bluejays undefeated in 2015.
“By far. By far. I didn’t even care if I got it,” he said. “It felt good.”
Vincent Keller was there to help setup Lopez-Espin for the goal. (Spomer/WBR) CLICK TO BUY
Something else that felt good was scoring the crucial goal one day shy of the one-year anniversary of when he tore his ACL and MCL, and delivering that strike against the team he was playing when he suffered that injury.
“When the schedule came out it was the first game I circled, and tomorrow is actually one year since it happened, so the timing of how this worked was kind of funny,” Lopez-Espin said. “That’s all I can ask for. I wasn’t thinking anything, just play my game. I didn’t put any extra pressure on myself. I’m just glad I scored, and it could’ve been anyone; I was just there.”
Right place. Right time. For a 19-year-old who has worked his way back from a knee injury that not many are ever able to fully recover from.
“I was extremely happy for him, because he worked his way in,” Bolowich said of how he reacted to the sophomore forward’s goal. “It took a long time for him, he sat out for so long. Not necessarily because it was Drake, and that game was when he got injured, I’m just happy for him to have the kind of success now coming back, and being in full swing, because he needed it. He needed to know that he’s still capable, that he still can do this, that he still can pull this team forward.”
The Bluejays remained unbeaten and untied with the victory, while Drake fell to 7-3-0 with the loss.
Although Creighton has outscored their opponents 26-4 on the season, Tuesday night’s win was the third time this season that they have had to erase a deficit in the second half. While the 4-0 wins, of which the Bluejays already have three this season, it’s these matches that require them to dig a little deeper that, according to their head coach, help bring out their character.
“Every game shows you something,” Bolowich said. “We were down at Seton Hall and we scored four goals, three in a span of whatever, and every game is a little bit different. Every game has a different character to it, every game has a different flow and a different rhythm. When you come back from these games against a tough team that is all jacked up and fired up — it could make their season to win at our place against the number one team, and everybody is gunning for that. You’re digging yourself a hole and then you have to climb out. It’s not easy to do, but the credit goes back to the team. It goes back to our players, and it goes back to our leaders who showed great character and pulled it out.”
Next up for Creighton, who is 2-0-0 in Big East action, is a 7:00 p.m. conference match against St. John’s (3-6-2) at Morrison Stadium on Saturday. The Red Storm are off to a 1-0-1 start in Big East play with a 0-0 tie at home against Marquette and a 1-0 on the road against Seton Hall.