CAMBRIDGE, Mass. The No. 21 Dartmouth men's soccer team dropped to second place in the Ivy League standings after a 2-1 loss to No. 16 Harvard here on Saturday. It was the Big Green's third consecutive loss.
Dartmouth (8-5-1, 3-2-0 Ivy) had to fight for an equalizer early on, as the Crimson (11-3-1, 3-1-1 Ivy) quickly netted its first goal from a corner kick in the fifth minute to take an early lead. The Big Green pressured Harvard, taking nine shots in the first 45 minutes, three of which were on goal, but still trailed at the half.
Striker Lucky Mkosana '12 put Dartmouth back in the game in the 56th minute with a thundering volley in the box that tied the score, but the Crimson quickly turned the tables when Harvard's Andre Akpan beat two defenders to reclaim the lead just seven minutes later.
Despite outshooting the Crimson 18-5, Dartmouth left with a loss.
The Big Green won the battle for possession in the first half, but found no answer to Harvard's first goal, which came from Kwaku Nyamekye, who half-volleyed the ball from a corner kick. Co-captain Dan Keat '10 and winger Austin Bowers '11 both tested the Harvard keeper just minutes later, and striker Maarten van Ess '12 latched on to a long ball for a header in the 13th minute, but the shot went wide.
Harvard came close to extending its lead 10 minutes before halftime, when keeper Sean Donovan '13 could not hold on to a shot and the ball rolled towards an open goal, but defender Pumi Maqubela '10 dashed back to clear it off the goal line just in time.
The Big Green entered the second half setting the pace of the game with more controlled possession and more shot attempts. Eleven minutes into the second half, Dartmouth found its equalizing goal from Mkosana.
The build-up started from defender Walker Linares '11, who brought up the ball and sent it into the box.
After an in-air scramble for the ball, van Ess set it down for Mkosana, who drilled it into the roof of the net.
The goal was Mkosana's seventh of the season. He has 16 points this year.
Despite the heightened energy from the goal, Dartmouth succumbed to one of Harvard's long balls in the 63rd minute. Akpan collected the ball, beat two defenders on the right wing and squared up to fire the ball to the the left corner for the winning goal.
Akpan leads the Ivy League with 11 goals this season, followed by Keat and Mkosana, who have seven each.
The Crimson almost found a third goal just minutes later, as the Dartmouth defense was caught out of position, leaving a Harvard forward in the center of the box wide open, but he fired the ball off of the woodwork, giving the Big Green a lucky break.
Dartmouth's last real attempt came with seven minutes remaining in the game, as a cross from the left wing gave a slew of Dartmouth players in the box a chance to get a foot on it, but the Crimson cleared the ball without incident.
The game saw a change in Dartmouth's formation, which so far this year resembled a 4-3-3 setup, in which Mkosana took the role of the striker up top.
Switching back to a 4-4-2, the Big Green tried to put more pressure on the Crimson with two strikers.
"We wanted to put another guy up front to give the other team more to worry about going forward," head coach Jeff Cook said. "In some ways it was effective, in that our team can play in different ways and it keeps our opponents guessing a bit."
Keat said that the team did well in adapting to the change in formation, and that they executed their strategy in the new setup.
Dartmouth will next head to Durham, N.H., to take on the University of New Hampshire (9-5-2, 6-0-1 America East) on Tuesday. After that, Dartmouth will continue on to play Cornell (5-5-5, 0-2-3 Ivy) at home, before traveling to take on Brown (8-1-5, 3-1-0 Ivy).
Cook said that, despite the loss to Harvard, winning the next three games could give the team a good chance of progressing to the NCAA tournament.
The NCAA's second RPI report was released last Monday, and has Dartmouth ranked 32nd nationally. This report is an indicator to the tournament's seeding and selection process, which will take place later in the season.
