M Soccer beats Niagara 3-1, advances to NCAA 2nd Rd. at #5 Akron

Submitted by Wolverine Devotee on

Coach Chaka Daley picked up his first NCAA Tournament win at Michigan tonight. Michigan beat the niagara purple eagles 3-1 at home tonight to move to 11-9-1 on the season. Michigan is now 8-4 all-time in the NCAA Tournament with a perfect 5-0 record in the first round.

Michigan will face a familiar foe next. They will travel to akron and play the 5-seed zips on Sunday at 4:30pm.

The two teams have played 4 times in 3 years. akron ended Michigan's magic run in the NCAA Tournament in 2010 en route to a national championship. Michigan got revenge however last year in a 1-0 2OT thriller despite having a down year.

The two teams met in the regular season with akron winning 1-0 at home. Michigan's record against akron all-time is 4-8-0.

 

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I Bleed Maize N Blue

November 15th, 2012 at 11:40 PM ^

I was watching on gametracker, and I could not believe the massive shot advantage we had, and it was still 0-0.  And then Niagara scored on their 2nd shot, 1st on goal.  Fortunately, we came back.

Hopefully, we will put one in the net sooner and keep Akron to zip.  Go Blue!

Joined: 09/27/2008

MGoPoints: 58692

bnoble

November 16th, 2012 at 5:06 PM ^

 

My son and I were at the match.  At about the 30' mark, we both noticed that there were Michigan "shots" recorded that were, shall we say, awfully generous in the scorer's interpretation of "shot".  Likewise, at least one close miss by Niagara in the second half wasn't recorded---we joked at the time that the same strike might have been credited as two shots had it been taken by Michigan.

Until the second goal---which was a bit of a fluky deflection off a defender---I was not convinced M would pull it out.  There was a shot advantage, no doubt---and a good chunk of play was in the Niagara half of the field.  But it wasn't quite as lopsided as the score sheet suggests, and it looked like it might be one of those games where the team pressing advantage just couldn't get one to go in.

Joined: 01/02/2011

MGoPoints: 412

Mmmm Hmmm

November 16th, 2012 at 9:15 AM ^

What sort of reputation does Michigan's soccer coach have?  My knowledge of the team is limited to updates on this board, but I got the sense that 2010 was a run based on lots of pieces coming together and this year was the result of getting the most out of the remaining pieces, both of which suggest a good to very good coach.

Joined: 09/12/2010

MGoPoints: 5144

Alton

November 16th, 2012 at 9:44 AM ^

That was two different people coaching Michigan in 2010 and 2012.

Steve Burns was the coach from 2000 through 2011, and resigned after going 5-14-1 last season.  The current coach, Chaka Daley, is in his first season at Michigan and was the coach at Providence for 12 seasons before coming to Michigan.

I can't claim to know enough about soccer to comment on Daley's reputation, but turning a program from 5-14-1 into a top-30 team in one season is impressive, even if the pieces were already in place from the previous staff.

Joined: 07/05/2008

MGoPoints: 13273