On Thursday, No. 7 Stanford women’s soccer fell to No. 1 Duke at home by a final score of 4-1. Duke midfielder Maggie Graham scored three goals for the Blue Devils while Stanford midfielder Shae Harvey scored the lone goal for the Cardinal. Leah Freeman was the winning goalkeeper for the Blue Devils with only one goal allowed and eight saves while Haley Craig was the losing goalkeeper for the Cardinal with four goals allowed and two saves. Duke improves to 9-1-0 overall and 4-0-0 in the ACC while Stanford falls to 11-1-1 overall and 3-1-1 in the ACC.
BOX SCORE: Duke at Stanford-Thursday, October 10th
“Yeah, a really bad start to the game,” Stanford head coach Paul Ratcliffe said after the match. “I think we gave up two, we gave them two goals in the first three minutes and I think that set the tone for the whole match.”
Duke scored quickly in this match as Maggie Graham scored her first two goals at 3:53 and 4:07, the first goal coming off an assist from Ella Hase and the second goal being unassisted. Less than five minutes into the match, Stanford was already in an 0-2 hole. When you get down by so much so fast, it can be really hard to recover.
“I know we gave away two sitters, easy goals,” Ratcliffe said. “I think they were easy to score, but full credit to Duke. I thought their whole team, wasn’t just her [Graham], she was a potent scorer if she scored three, but I think their whole team was just locked in. I’m sure they wanted redemption from last year, so they did a great job and full credit to them and they got redemption.”
Stanford would get on the board at 33:24 as Shae Harvey was able to score as the ball barely crossed the goal line off an assist from Eleanor Klinger. That would make it a 2-1 match, a score that would hold through halftime.
“Yeah, we just needed to be more aggressive as a group,” Ratcliffe said about what the message was at halftime. “I thought we were very passive. I thought we started the game, to concede those two goals was just a passive mentality and I think we paid the price for that, so they wanted to up the intensity. And when they did, they were really good.”
In the second half, Duke scored in a very similar fashion to how they did in the first half as forward Devin Lynch scored at 60:01 before Graham scored her third goal of the night at 66:13 to make it a 4-1 lead for the Blue Devils, a lead that would end up being the final score. Both goals were assisted as Maggie Graham and Mia Oliaro got the assist to Lynch and the Farrah Walters and Lynch got the assist to Graham.
Stanford would have opportunities to even up the match and make it interesting both prior to the scoring of Duke’s third and forth goals as well as afterwards. On top of that, Eleanor Klinger got fouled and received a penalty kick at 75:58, but was unable to capitalize. Had the ball bounced a different way, Stanford might have pulled this one out. They outshot Duke 16-13 on the night and was +3 on corner kicks (6-3).
This wasn’t a case of Stanford not playing good offense or having chances. This was instead a case of the ball not bouncing their way combined with a couple of really bad defensive lapses at the very beginning. Once again, you can’t expect to win a match if you give up two goals as quickly as Stanford did.
“I think we outshot them in the night,” Ratcliffe said. “And their goalkeeper made some really nice saves, so it could have been a different night for us, but whenever you start the game as slow as we did and we give two goals away in the first three minutes, it’s gonna be very difficult against a quality team like Duke to come back and win and then we missed a penalty kick. So, it was just a tough night all around. It was that kind of a bad karma night in my eyes for whatever reason, but it happens. It’s part of soccer.”
At this point, all that Stanford can do is look to move on from this loss and get ready for their next match. On that note, Stanford’s next match is on Sunday at 1:00 PM PT on ACCNX against North Carolina.
“You have to learn the lessons from each match,” Ratcliffe said. “There were a few lessons learned here and I hope they take those and apply them moving forward. But yeah, it wasn’t horrible in my eyes. I think we started really badly, but to outshoot them, the number one team in the country, to outshoot them says something. But we could have played a lot better. We didn’t play to our potential. It was really disappointing. But Duke had a great game. They were locked in and they seemed to have a really good intensity about them.”
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