It would have been easy for the women's soccer team to overlook yesterday's non-conference midweek game against Brandeis.
Fresh off its fourth conference victory last Saturday and gearing up for this weekend's Homecoming showdown with Bowdoin, Tufts rejected the temptation to look past the Judges and recorded its sixth straight victory with a 4-3 win at Kraft Field.
While the Jumbos ultimately emerged with the win - their third in as many years against the Judges - the road to their seventh victory was not so easy. Three consecutive Brandeis goals in the middle of the first half turned an early 2-0 lead into a one-goal deficit.
Such back-and-forth play ultimately set up the dramatic ending, in which senior co-captain Martha Furtek broke the 3-3 tie with a shot inside the left post with less than two minutes to play.
Although the team was happy with the outcome, the finish was not what they had planned for what should have been a midweek coaster.
"We wanted to come out really strong and try and score early just to get the lead and not let Brandeis come out flying on us," sophomore Ali Maxwell said.
"But it probably made us slow down a little bit after that, and we kind of got complacent for the first half."
Six minutes into the game, the team had already built a two-goal lead, and either because of Tufts' quiet opening or its opponents' relentlessness, Brandeis stormed back into the game.
"At the beginning of the first half, for some reason we just didn't quite look as good as we normally do," sophomore Jesslyn Jamison said. "They were sort of coming in really hard, and we couldn't quite pull it together and play our game. We did that a lot better in the second half."
The second half was certainly another story for Tufts. The squad out-shot the Judges 15 to four, an advantage missing in the first half, in which Brandeis launched 10 shots compared to the Jumbos' nine.
"After the first half, we knew we needed to come out really strong or there was a good possibility we would lose the game," senior Joelle Emery said. "I think we just came out with more intensity. We beat them to balls all over the field, and the forwards did a great job working to get the shots off."
That intensity in the second may have been a product of sophomore Cara Cadigan's goal near the end of the first, which halted the barrage of offense from Brandeis and evened the score at three apiece heading into intermission.
The goal was half of Cadigan's offensive production on the day, and the pair of goals padded her already-impressive 2007 resume. She now has nine on the season, which leaves her NESCAC opponents in the dust; the league's second-leading scorer has five goals.
Although the team saved itself with some late-game scoring, Tufts yielded its highest single-game goal total of the season to the Judges. In the previous seven games, the team surrendered just four total. Sophomore goalkeeper Kate Minnehan, who saved six shots in a 1-0 win over Bates on Saturday, her fourth shutout of the season, finished with three goals allowed and four saves.
"I don't think Kate is at all to blame," Emery said. "We had some defensive breakdowns, and we let them get some open shots off that they shouldn't have gotten off, and she had no chance to get the wide-open shots in front of the goal. We should have been marking up better."
"[Minnehan] played great," Maxwell said. "The goals were definitely not her fault. Brandeis transitioned really well. We just had a few positioning breakdowns, and they were able to capitalize."
Tufts hopes to avoid those types of breakdowns this weekend when it hosts Bowdoin in Saturday's Homecoming game. The Jumbos beat Bowdoin 2-1 on Oct. 7 last year, but the Polar Bears are 6-2 and coming off of two straight wins - one of which came against a Middlebury team that Tufts needed double overtime to top on Sept. 15.
"We played [Bowdoin] in preseason and they were really strong and really fast," junior Maya Shoham said. "They have a new coach, and they're a lot better than they've been in the past, so we're expecting a really good game. We just have to play 100 percent right from the start and not come out flat."
