MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Marshall men’s soccer coach Chris Grassie described his team’s first match in Morgantown this season as its worst performance, with the Thundering Herd suffering a 3-0 loss in Morgantown on Halloween.
On Wednesday night, 12th-ranked Marshall made the most of an opportunity to settle the score in a Sun Belt semifinal as Joao Alves converted a penalty kick with 36 seconds remaining in the second overtime to lift the third-seeded Herd to a 3-2 victory over the 17th-ranked Mountaineers at Dick Dlesk Soccer Stadium.
“It was a much better performance,” Grassie said. “That was probably our worst performance of the season and this was probably our most gritty performance of the season.”
FINAL: Marshall 3, West Virginia 2
Joao Alves converts a penalty kick with 36 seconds left in the second overtime.
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As the No. 2 seed, WVU (12-4-3) was host and would’ve been again Sunday for the Sun Belt final that will instead be played in Huntington after fifth-seeded Central Florida got by top seed Kentucky, 1-0.
Alves’ winning goal came after a Video Assistant Referee (VAR) review called West Virginia’s Carlos Hernando for handball inside the 18-yard box.
“Ultimately, it’s just a really cruel moment in the game,” West Virginia coach Dan Stratford said. “We’ll have to lick our wounds and bounce back. We have more soccer to play.”
Earlier in overtime, VAR had looked at a similar scenario for a possible Marshall handball, but stuck with the original ruling.
“Asked the referee for clarification on that one and he didn’t feel like they were the same thing,” Stratford said.
WVU’s head coach felt his team was getting stronger as the match progressed.
“I asked one of [Marshall’s] assistants if they were playing for penalties and he said 100 percent,” Stratford said.
After a scoreless first half, both teams picked up the pace in a major way.
Marshall (11-2-5) struck first 2:17 into the second half on Carl Romberg’s fourth goal this season.
The Mountaineers countered immediately when Isaac Scheer buried a shot off a feed from Constantinos Christou, enabling WVU to draw even in the 53rd minute.
Yet less than 3 minutes later, Grassie’s side regained its advantage courtesy of Joao Roberto’s goal off an Alves assist.
“He’s an energizer,” Grassie said of Roberto. “He’s a little bit of chaos in a good way. Sometimes he does things the opponent or we’re not expecting and adds a little flair to it.”
WVU continued to press forward and nearly got even on a couple occasions, before doing so in the 67th minute when Sun Belt Player of the Year Marcus Caldeira accounted for his 10th goal of the year.
“They move the ball very well, but we defended really well and then we’d go up and relax,” Grassie said.
Caldeira nearly scored again in the 89th minute for WVU’s first lead, but his left-footed shot from the top of the box sailed just high, preventing the Mountaineers from late heroics in a second straight match.
Instead, the teams played a scoreless 10-minute overtime period and then a second, which nearly concluded without a goal as well.
“How the game concluded and going to overtime, I would like to think if most people picked a winner at that point, most people would have picked WVU,” Stratford said. “Marshall has been a good team and continues to show they’re a good team. It’s not a bad loss, because they’re a quality side. It’s more the nature of the loss.”
Both goalkeepers — Marshall’s Eddie DeMarco and West Virginia’s Marc Bonnaire — finished with five saves.