I’m going to use an age-old phrase to start this week’s edition: It’s only one game.
Usually whenever someone uses that phrase in reference to the performance level of their team, they are trying their hardest to cope with an unsavory result. That is partially the case here. A 4-0 loss, with three of those goals coming in the first 10 minutes of the match, will have anyone hoping that their team was just off their game that day.
But I also mean it as a reminder to myself going forward with these articles
for the rest of the season to be less declarative. Each issue of this column is covering two games at maximum, this issue and the last have each covered one game a piece. All of that is to say that someone might get whiplash if they read last week’s column titled “They Can Do It”, only to see a headline this week that makes it seem like the world is falling down. That can’t continuously be the case for the entire season.
At the end of the day this squad is a very up-and-down, inconsistent unit that is capable of beating any team in the country. That includes, more often than one might like, themselves. It feels lazy to come out of a game where a team loses by four and have the main takeaway be the ’Cats got in their own way, but I’m struggling to think of what else might be an apt descriptor. The first goal came from a Rutgers player getting onto a second ball in the six-yard box off a corner. Those are the type of goals that you get ripped for because the fixes should seemingly be simple: track your man in the box and get goal side of him. But then the exact same thing happened on the second goal, except off a throw-in instead, which only seems to rub salt in the wound.
And for the third goal, the backline failed to deal with a long ball over the top. Usually Fritz Volmar would be in the position that Josue Pfrommer was in, and given his track record this season he likely would have cut out the chance. But he wasn’t in one of the CB positions this game — he was pushed to LB to replace Johnson in light of his red card last week against Michigan (which was also 100% completely avoidable). All three goals could be chalked up to individual errors, one of which was an error that occurred seven days prior.
Overall, Volmar looked much less comfortable out on the left as opposed to in the middle, which prompted Tre Barrett to sub in at this position to let Volmar return to the center. Pfrommer, who, to his credit, had a very good game last time out, had his shaky moments in this one. Rutgers had other chances to score off of long balls targeted towards Pfrommer throughout the half.
I’ve declined to discuss the attack at all up to this point. There is less to say. The final ball and overall link up play were lacking throughout the game. There were an extreme amount of giveaways, and overall it reminded me of the first half against Notre Dame all the way back in August.
Which, in itself, is not something you would want to say about a team in the second half of its season.
My main takeaway from this game is that Northwestern has lost four games now on the season: vs Xavier, at Marquette, at Michigan State, at Rutgers. Of those four, the only one where I believe NU put up a good performance but was simply outclassed is the game against the Spartans. The first 45 of the Rutgers contest and the entirety of the other two games were prime examples of the ’Cats beating themselves.
This is also why making predictions for the rest of the season is difficult. Do I know what version of the ’Cats will show up? No, not conclusively. I know what they are capable of, I know what level of performance I hope to see on any given gameday, but the variance week to week is too high.
It feels like for every Maryland 4-0 this team has, there’s a Rutgers 4-0 loss. Every 1-0 Michigan win is cancelled out by the 2-0 Michigan State. The bad first half against Notre Dame stands in direct contrast to the amazing second half. This all ties back to the point I opened up with, this is just one game. I’m not going to say that the B1G tournament is now a distant dream because of this result, and I wouldn’t say we’re a lock to make it if we had been on the opposite end of today’s result. At the end of the day, everyone can choose how much stock they put into this team the remainder of the way. I’m often guilty of having too much.
I also don’t learn from my mistakes; I’m willing to put it all that the NU from the Maryland and Michigan turns up a few more times this season. If I go for broke, so be it, I’ll do it as a believer.
