Cal Poly looks to bounce back against UC Irvine

It sure didn’t feel like a regular-season game.

The national broadcast by Fox Soccer Channel pushed the match’s start back an hour further into the night. The Alex G. Spanos Stadium sellout crowd of 11,075 was the third-largest regular-season audience in college men’s soccer history. Soon after the outcome, celebratory flares were set off in the stands.

But Friday night’s epic wasn’t a championship game, nor even a postseason one. It was merely another meeting between Cal Poly and UC Santa Barbara.

This year’s version was a 1-0, 101st-minute Mustangs loss that came on the one-year anniversary of their first win over the Central Coast rival in 13 tries.

The Mustangs won 2-1 last year in San Luis Obispo before what was then a school-record 7,143 and ran their record to 9-1-1. They finished 2-3-3 the rest of the year, though, and missed the playoffs.

They’ll try to prevent a similar letdown the rest of this year, beginning at 7 tonight when they host UC Irvine.

“It was a hard loss, for sure,” Cal Poly head coach Paul Holocher said. “The way that we lost, it just happened so quickly.”

All but one of Cal Poly’s losses have come by a single goal.

“We have basically made the one big mistake that costs us the game,” Holocher said. “That’s concentration.”

Mustangs senior goalkeeper Eric Branagan-Franco agreed.

“We have to be completely focused throughout the game and just make smart choices,” he said. “We beat ourselves by making stupid mistakes.”

Part of what may have contributed to the momentary lapse leading to the defensive breakdown, freshman forward Wes Feighner said after the game, was that play was stopped prior to the start of the second overtime when bottles were thrown from the south bleachers onto the field in the direction of UCSB goalkeeper Kristopher Minton.

Moments later, UCSB’s David Walker sent a cross to Chris Pontius for the win.

While Holocher denounced the unruly crowd behavior, he wasn’t willing to blame the defensive breakdown on the play stoppage preceding it.

“You look at our backline and we’re pretty young,” Holocher said of a group including two freshmen and a sophomore. “So experience is going to help these guys. Unfortunately, the losses are sometimes what it takes for them to really grow.”

Branagan-Franco also took solace in what could be gained in the long term.

“No doubt it’s young, but we have a really athletic backline with a lot of capability for the future,” Branagan-Franco said. “They played great defense for so long. We’ll learn from those mistakes.”

The Mustangs (8-4-2, 3-2 Big West Conference) will need to quickly against the Anteaters (8-1-4, 1-1-2), who’ve held their opponents to fewer than 10 shots per game and are ranked 20th in the College Soccer News poll.

“They’re very organized defensively,” Holocher said.

UC Irvine is led by senior midfielder Matt Murphy and sophomore forward Spencer Thompson.

Murphy, who Holocher said thrives most on set pieces and free kicks, was a CSN preseason All-American Third Team selection and boasts a team-best 18 points, while Thompson isn’t far behind, at 15.

“(Murphy) has no problem shooting from 35 feet out so we’re going to have to be very alert,” Branagan-Franco said. “And Thompson is going to do great things.”

Offensively, Holocher said, the Mustangs could stand to benefit from being more judicious and patient.

“We could definitely be a little bit sharper in the final third of the field,” he said. “Closer to the goal, we need to have a bit more composure and try to produce some more quality chances.”

The postseason atmosphere of the UCSB loss only figures to intensify as Big West teams vie for the conference’s top four spots and places in the inaugural conference tournament. Its winner gains an automatic bid to the playoffs.

Being able to apply the lessons learned from the UCSB defeat sooner than a week after it happened could be key in finding the momentum that led to three shutout wins over the Mustangs’ previous four matches, Branagan-Franco said.

“We’ve had a couple good training days getting ready,” he said. “The big thing is just going to be getting back out on the pitch and making things happen.”