The LSU soccer team kicked off its four-game road swing on Sept. 11 with perhaps its most impressive performance of the season, but the Tigers couldn’t carry that momentum into Sunday’s match against No. 25 Duke.
After defeating BYU 4-3 in a back-and-forth contest last Thursday, LSU (4-3-1) couldn’t find any room in the attack against the Blue Devils’ (4-4) smothering back line and fell to Duke 1-0 on Sunday at Koskinen Stadium in Durham, North Carolina.
The loss dropped the Tigers to 1-2 on the road this season and 0-1-1 all-time against the Blue Devils.
“We’ve got such a young team with six freshmen starting up the spine of the team, right up the middle, and Duke kind of got us on our heels in the first 15 minutes,” said LSU coach Brian Lee. “Once we settled down in the second half, we had our chances to equalize.”
From the opening kickoff, Duke put constant pressure on LSU’s young back line in the attack and kept freshman goalkeeper Lily Alfeld busy throughout the match. The Blue Devils fired off 27 shots with 10 on target, which were the most the Tigers have allowed this season and the most since a 3-2 loss against Texas A&M on Oct. 31, 2013.
Despite Duke’s abundance of shots, Alfeld held her own in goal and had the best game of her eight-game LSU career. The New Zealand native posted a career-high nine saves against the Blue Devils, breaking her previous high of six. Alfeld has 27 saves in her last four games.
“In the first half, when everyone’s at the same pressure, it’s easy for the goalkeepers to stay in the game,” Lee said. “But in the second half, when the game was against our back a little more, [Alfeld] did really well cutting out crosses, and she had one key stop on a breakaway.”
However, Alfeld couldn’t completely shut out Duke in the first 45 minutes. With a little more than five minutes remaining in the opening half, Blue Devils senior midfielder Katy Colas broke the stalemate when she snuck the ball past Alfeld from just inside the area that gave the Duke a 1-0 into the break.
On the other side of the pitch, the Tigers failed to give Alfeld any support in the attack in the first 45 minutes. At the break, LSU had only two shots against Duke junior goalkeeper Ali Kershner with none on target.
The Tigers picked things up on offense in the second half, but Colas’ goal proved to be all the Blue Devils needed come away with a victory.
LSU freshman striker Jorian Baucom fired the Tigers’ first shot on goal in the 57th minute of the contest off a through pass from sophomore defender Megan Lee. But Duke freshman goalkeeper EJ Proctor ensured the ball didn’t find its way into the net with her first of two saves on the afternoon.
LSU junior midfielder Natalia Gomez-Junco’s shot in the 85th minute was the Tigers’ last opportunity for the equalizer. After briefly exiting the match to get checked out by the training staff, Gomez-Junco, who led LSU with three shots, fired a ball from distance that Proctor once again prevented from going in.
The Tigers had only eight shots on the afternoon, less than a third of Duke’s output.
“Coming out of the back, Duke was able to press us pretty well,” Brian Lee said. “We just weren’t connecting passes to get forward. We kept playing laterally. But when we did get the ball forward on possessions, we were dangerous. We just turned the ball over too much.”
LSU will continue its four-game road stretch when it opens its Southeastern Conference schedule with a match against SEC opponent Missouri at 6:30 p.m. on Friday at Walton Stadium.
You can reach David Gray on Twitter @dgray_TDR.