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The football team wasn’t the only Badger squad to come away disappointed after facing Michigan on Saturday. The men’s soccer team was forced to settle for a 1-1 tie against the Wolverines after surrendering a penalty kick in the final minute of regulation on the same day.

“I had to remind myself on Sunday that it was a tie because actually it felt like a loss,” said head coach Jeff Rohrman in his press conference Monday. “We played very, very well for probably 88 minutes of that match, and unfortunately we let our guard down and probably made a couple bad decisions down the stretch.”

Rohrman knows to expect the unexpected in his sport, but even he was surprised that his team gave up a goal with little time remaining in the wake of their late defensive meltdown.

“In the game of soccer, if you’re only up one goal, anything can happen late and it did against us,” Rohrman said. “It was a little surprising to me because certainly, as I’ve alluded to pretty much all year, we have a really veteran team, a seasoned team, a matured team.”

Rohrman credited his team’s poise and maturity in overtime after giving up the late goal.

“I’ve been a part of teams where mentally and emotionally you let that linger into the overtime, and all of a sudden that tie becomes a loss,” Rohrman said. “I give our guys some credit because when that happens 24 seconds from the end … and you’re not focused, you’re not concentrated, you’re not putting in the effort you need to sustain it through the overtime.”

The tie kept the Badgers from getting their first Big Ten win in nearly two years. However, the winless streak shows no cause for concern on Rohrman’s part or on his outlook on the remaining soccer season.

“I expect us to do a little bit better,” Rohrman said. “As I told [the team] after the game, I expect us to have leads late in games from this point on, and to handle [it] a little bit differently. So far we’re sitting at 4-2-2. We’ve got some great wins, we’ve had some great play out of a number of our players.”

Moving beyond the tie

Rohrman and his team are looking to put the disappointing tie behind them and move on with their season. The Badgers started out hot with four wins and a tie in their first five games but have cooled down significantly with two losses and a tie in the past two weeks.

“As I tell a lot of the guys, it’s important to have a short memory sometimes because the sting of [the] tie from Saturday [is something] you want to try to erase as quickly as you can,” Rohrman said.

The Badgers will get a break from Big Ten play on Wednesday as they take on the Western Illinois Leathernecks at home in the McClimon Soccer Complex but jump right back into the hunt for their first conference win of the season as they travel to Michigan State on Saturday.

“On Wednesday with Western [Illinois] coming in, it’s a quality opponent, a regional opponent for us,” Rohrman said. “They’re going to be one of the top teams in the Summit Conference, so it’s going to be important for us to play well. ”

The Badgers have a tough eight-game stretch in the month of October. Half those games are against conference opponents, meaning that the next month will determine not only the Badgers’ fate in the Big Ten but also whether they bounce back and make the playoffs.

“We’re going to have a busy month of October; we have a lot of games packed in,” Rohrman said. “We’ve got four more Big Ten matches, and I’d like to think we’re capable of winning any of those matches.”