No. 5 Wake Forest Men’s Soccer played to a 0-0 draw with No. 6 West Virginia Saturday night in front of 3,028 fans at Spry Stadium.
“I like the energy from the guys from the start,” Wake Forest coach Bobby Muuss said after the match. “As you’re in preseason, the guys are working extremely hard. This is a hard-working group and there’s competition at every position. Since they’ve worked so hard, I was a little worried they would be tired.
“And because there is competition at every position, I was worried about the tenseness in not wanting to make a mistake. They want to perform and take ownership of roles.”
The Mountaineers rolled into Winston-Salem having already competed in exhibitions against Duquesne and Virginia Tech.
“Tonight I saw a pretty collective, hard-working performance against a really well-coached and disciplined, experienced West Virginia team,” Muuss said. “They had a couple of preseason wins already. That was probably one of the most exciting, in terms of both teams going after it, preseason matches we’ve had in a long time.
“We had some silly mistakes, like missed clearances from players who we expected to do better than that. Let’s be fair, our guys will tell you we’ve only worked on our attacking soccer the last three days. Everything has been defended and our press. I think you can see when we’re collectively doing our press, it’s pretty good. We’re pretty athletic and we’re committed to it. When we’re a little late in it, I didn’t like that, or when we were reactive instead of proactive.”
The Demon Deacons possessed the ball 52 percent of the time, outshot West Virginia 12-2 and had five corner kick opportunities to none for the Mountaineers.
“We definitely need to get better in the final third,” Muuss said. “We had the ball. We only had four shots in the first half, but then we picked it up in the second half. We have to finish some of those close-range chances. You can’t fault the guys when they are getting in those spaces so early in the season.”
Although Wake Forest created more shot attempts for themselves in the second half, it was in the first half where their pressure was perhaps even more effective. The Deacs possessed 60 percent of the first half, contesting every pass from the Mountaineers in Demon Deacon territory.
“That was the plan, right?” Muuss said. “I give West Virginia all the credit in the world, because they’re playing football. I’d say most college soccer teams across the country, when they see a team press high, they’re going to go big. And West Virginia stuck to their identity by playing proper futbol. I give them a ton of credit for doing it.
“We get a lot of praise for the way we play, and they should get a lot of praise as well. We saw two teams playing tonight that tried to stick to their identity. I thought it was an exciting match.”
The Deacs return to Spry Stadium for an 8 pm match against Central Florida to be the regular season.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Muuss said. “We’re going to be playing an unknown opponent, meaning we’re not going to get video on them. People are going to get our video and UCF will have two games on video and we’ll have none on them.
“But we still have a lot of work to do in terms of finding the best positional relationships to put us in the best position to win games against different types of opponents. We got a little bit of that tonight, by seeing who was capable against a good opponent. We have some work to do to get the right guys on the field at the right time.
Twenty-five Demon Deacons saw the pitch Saturday night with a bevy of underclassmen getting valuable experience against one of the top teams in the country.
“We played every healthy field player tonight and two goalkeepers,” Muuss said. “We have some depth, as long as the depth is keeping the level up. We have some young inexperienced guys who got some experience today. We have a lot to get where we want to get. We’re just worried about Thursday and we want to get better each game. The intensity and tempo in the press tonight is what we wanted to see.”
Three who did not play, but should be back shortly are seniors David Wrona and Omar Hernandez, and sophomore forward Babacar Niang.
“They’re three really talented, big pieces of the group moving forward, and they’re all really close,” Muuss said.
The atmosphere in Spry Stadium was electric Saturday night, as fans continued to stream into the stands through the early portions of the first half, helping to provide an incredible home field advantage for the Deacs.
“We have an 8 pm nationally televised soccer game, the first televised soccer game of the year on the ACC Network,” Muuss said. “We need that and then some to come out and support them. Hopefully they saw tonight that we have some electric players and some athleticism. It’s great to be back.
“Our seniors are the only group who have really felt Spry full. We have a responsibility on our end to provide a product that will excite fans to come out to Spry. We hope the place is packed Thursday. We need each and every one of what we believe are the best fans in the country to come out and support us.”