Donigan: An “embarrassing” start to the soccer season
There was little to praise about SLU’s season-opening 3-0 loss to New Mexico on Tuesday night.
“It’s embarrassing,” SLU coach Dan Donigan said. “It was a disappointing performance. I can count the guys who played hard and played smart on one hand. There weren’t very many. It was disheartening for me and disappointing. The boys need to find it within themselves. By no means do the players always have to take the fall, it ultimately falls on the coaches, but they make the mistakes we talk about all the time. Your defensive starting position, getting where you need to be early, simple things that make goals preventable, that would have made the PK preventable. … We just can’t make those simple, fundamental mistakes that I think are preventable. It’s a little bit of a gut check time for our guys and we need to regroup quickly because we have two tough games on the road. … It’s playing hard and playing smart.”
The few players Donigan was pleased with in the game were mostly his newcomers: Transfer Mike Roach, freshmen Nick Maglasang and Adam Sweetin and senior Josh Aranda.
“It’s a long season, we’ve got a lot of games left,” Donigan said, “and I think our guys will definitely learn from this. That’s really the only positive. We’ve got a lot of time to recover from this and we will.”
The Billikens problem is they do not have enough foreign players on their roster. Donigan has built the team around players from the St. Louis and Kansas City area. These players are decent players on the local high school and club level, but lack the skill level that most foreign players have in this sport.
The Bills looked extremely uninspired and afraid as they took their licks from New Mexico last night. The defense was abysmal and the offense looked like something Scott Linehan would design. You would think a team that’s been practicing since the first week of August would perform better then they did last night.
It’s long past time for DD to do the right thing and move on.
Rumor has it a few players failed their pre-season conditioning tests. Normally, that would be grounds for dismissal - however, Donigan feels some sort of loyalty to some of his scholarship players instead of giving time to student-athletes who dedicate themselves to improving on a year in and year out basis. This is sad. We no longer can hang with UI, UCLA, Maryland and CalStateLongBeach’s of the world, now we can’t even hang with the Lobos??
Bring back Creighton’s coach.
Was at the game.I thought very disorganized. Lots of players out of position seemed like to me. They will play better next couple of games.
If they could steal more players from IU they might have a chance?
AM ” Embarassing start to the Season.
I don’t get it?
I would assume who ever proof read this article rides the short bus?
When will Donigan get fired? He has destroyed a once proud college program.
fire donigan and bring in currier… dennis currier currently at dayton (2008 A-10 champs), st. louis guy and all he does is win
remember dipsy salowane (sp?), dennis brought him to st. louis before SLU recruited him away
here is currier’s profile
http://www.daytonflyers.com/sports/m-soccer/mtt/currier_dennis00.html