With four minutes remaining, a 3-2 deficit and 10 men on the field, Marquette men’s soccer was all but in the loss column for the first time this season.
After the first-year Bryce Richards fired a shot at the net to no avail, a perfect deflection fell right to the feet of Mitchell Dryden, who scored his first goal of the season to make the improbable probable.
“I’ll bring it back to one of our key words that keeps us accountable, it’s grit — and we didn’t lose any of that today,” Dryden said.
Dryden was one of the many Golden Eagles who fought until the very end. He was rewarded with an equalizing goal, which helped Marquette secure a 3-3 draw against Drake Thursday night at Valley Fields, keeping its undefeated start alive.
Just 15 minutes before Dryden scored, it looked like an entirely different story.
When Andreas Fotland picked up his first yellow for fouling a Drake forward outside the penalty area, an unfortunate matter became much more dire as the subsequent set piece was headed in to give the Bulldogs their first lead of the night, 3-2.
Not one minute later, Fotland attempted to stop a Drake counter-attack only to commit another hard foul. Just like that, he was thrown out of the game with a second yellow, and Marquette was down a goal and a man with just under 20 minutes to play.
“In the end, maybe [the foul] saved a goal, and that was the difference in us getting the draw in the match,” Marquette head coach David Korn said. “So sometimes, there’s a good tactical foul, but we have to be smart playing on a yellow and the situations we put ourselves in.”
Thursday’s match was the second time in three games that Marquette found itself down a man.
The Golden Eagles have also seen a pattern of needing to overcome deficits late in matches. In Sunday’s game against North Florida — it took two goals in the last four minutes to scratch out a win. It hasn’t been an issue so far.
In Sunday’s upcoming affair against Chicago State at 1 P.M. CST, Marquette will be looking to avoid digging itself out of a hole for the fourth straight game.
“It’s a razor-thin difference between winning a game, tying a game, and losing a game,” Korn said.
This article was written by Eamon Bevan. He can be reached at eamon.bevan@marquette.edu or on Twitter/X @EamonBevanMU.