There was no “fire in the hole,” a phrase that is known all too well to spectators that frequent Dail Soccer Stadium, Tuesday night as the Wolfpack took on the Georgia State Panthers. A large number of loyal students attended the game to watch their team, nearly filling the student section. Much to their dismay, neither team produced many shots and very few of those shots were actually on goal.
Georgia State took the lead early in the game, with a shot right past the goal keeper from sophomore midfielder Jamal Keene, which the Pack struggled to recover from. The rest of the game seemed to be a defensive struggle between the two opponents.
“I think both teams defended pretty well overall,” Coach Kelly Findley said. “I don’t think we were good at all in the first half, so we’re not going to get shots when you’re not good.”
State had a chance to come back near the end of the first half, with three shots in less than two minutes, all of which were futile. These three shots accounted for a third of the total shots attempted by the Pack.
Although Findley believed his defense played well, he was disappointed with the team’s performance, especially in the first half.
“I think we have to do a little bit of a gut check and figure out what we’re willing to do to get results,” Findley said. “Right now I think we think we can just come out and perform and we’re obviously not even close to being good enough and hopefully the guys will figure that out.”
Findley believes that the team’s mental state had an impact on their poor performance.
“I think our attitude was poor in the first half,” Findley said. “I think we talked about being blue-collar rebounding from a tough loss, when we should have been frustrated, motivated, and a little bit angry about the tough loss on Friday night. Instead we came out and took a team lightly and didn’t play for forty five minutes, and it cost us a game.”
The Pack, frustrated after a loss to Clemson last Friday, was matched by the Panthers in aggressiveness. In the midst of the struggle for possession of the ball, 4 yellow cards were given, three of which were claimed by Georgia State.
Sophomore midfielder Michael Osei said that he didn’t hear any trash talking on the field, regardless of how aggressively they were playing. He expressed his disappointment with their loss.
“I think we came out to do our best, but we need to be blue collar and come out here to win,” Osei said. “It kind of sucks to come out here and lose on [our] field. Now we’re going to come out here hungry and do what we can do best to win games now.”
The Pack will face the No. 14 Boston College on Friday at Dail Soccer Stadium at 7 p.m . This will be their third ACC game of the season.
