The NIU men’s soccer team was unable to grab a result in Ohio Saturday, losing 1-0 against No. 1 Akron, but proved again that the team can play with any team no matter what the record shows.

“It’s going to be difficult for anybody to beat them at any point this year, but I thought we gave ourselves a chance to stay in the game to potentially find a way to get a result,” NIU head coach
Eric Luzzi said. “It didn’t happen, but hopefully we’ll get a chance to see them in the conference tournament.”

NIU (6-6-1, 1-2-0) was incapable of getting anything going, taking three shots with only one on goal, but was able to disturb Akron’s game plan.

“The guys worked very hard,” Luzzi said. “We had a very specific plan and they did a good job to stick to it even though we had only two or three days of training during the week. I thought overall that it was pretty effective.”

The Zips (13-0-0, 4-0-0) have now been victorious in each of their matches, out-scoring their opponents 36-2.

“I thought our guys brought a lot of intensity,” Luzzi said. “We were pretty physical on the day and I thought it disrupted what they wanted to do.”

Akron’s freshman keeper David Meves, with a goals–against average of 0.16, is also looking to break former NIU keeper Joe Zimka’s 2006 record of goals-allowed average of 0.21.

In the 70th minute, redshirt sophomore midfielder Michael Nanchoff ended the gridlock by putting a free kick from arowwund 19 yards away into the back of the net after a deflection off of a Huskie defender.

“Akron ended up scoring on kind of a sloppy free kick that kind of got deflected on the way in,” Luzzi said. “It was really just a bit unlucky. Other than that, they might have had one other good chance and we had one good chance. Akron had a lot of the ball, but they didn’t really threaten us a ton.”

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