Men’s soccer star Madzongwe injures knee in loss

The Boston University men’s soccer team entered its three-day trip in North Carolina with hopes of stealing at least a point from two of the top teams in the country.

Not only did the Terriers fail to take any points from their games against Wake Forest University and No. 1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, they also suffered a critical blow to the team’s defense early in Friday’s loss.

Junior defender Kelvin Madzongwe left the game with a knee injury on Friday, severely crippling BU’s line of defense which had been anchored by him.

BU coach Neil Roberts said Madzongwe will miss a significant amount of time.

“We will probably know a little bit more by the end of the week,” Roberts said. “It will be a significant amount of time I’m afraid … it wasn’t a violent tackle or anything like that, it was sort of innocent.”

Now, without last year’s America East Defensive Player of the Year, the team’s formation has been forced to shift from the strategy that helped lead it to a 1–0 victory over then-No.11 Boston College.

In the victory over BC, BU used a formation that featured only three defenders as well as three forwards to help generate offense.

With a back line that only featured Madzongwe, sophomore defender Sanford Spivey and freshman defender Jeroen Blugh, BU locked down the Eagles offense and upset its rival.

However, Madzongwe only lasted 13 minutes in the game against Wake Forest before going down with the injury, leaving the Terriers’ back line thin and forcing the team to move out of its original formation into a more defensive one.

Despite this change, the team still allowed a “really bad goal” in the 57th minute and lost the game 3–1.

“[Madzongwe] has turned into such a leader for us on the field,” Roberts said. “He is vocal, he is a very quiet kid off the field but on the field he is very vocal, he helps the young guys, he has just done a great job at doing that … the defense kind of worked around him. So we had to adjust a little bit there.”

Redshirt freshmen defenders Mac McGuire and Parker Powell saw more playing time as a result of the injury. While Powell scored the team’s lone goal in the loss to Wake Forest and McGuire recorded an assist, it was clear that Roberts was using multiple defenders to fill the gap left by Madzongwe’s injury.

When the matchup against North Carolina began, the team began in the four-defender formation it finished the last game with, this time starting Powell and sophomore defender James Holler instead of Madzongwe and junior forward Ali Sozeri.

This is not the first time the defender from Magwegwe, Zimbabwe, has gotten hurt while playing with BU.

Madzongwe missed some time early last year as well, sitting out of the season’s first two games before playing only half of the third to regain his form. The Terriers went 1–1 in their games without Madzongwe, defeating the College of the Holy Cross 2–0 before dropping a game to then-No. 17 Monmouth University 1–0.

With the team’s most experienced defender out of the lineup, and with former America East Defender of the Year Colin Henry having graduated in the spring, Roberts is forced to rely upon a group of relatively inexperienced defenders led by Spivey.

“Spivey has developed so much in the last year from the first time he played to what he is now so he is going to have to take a bigger role tactically where he relied on Kelvin to do all that and make all the decisions,” Roberts said. “So Sanford will have to come into that, and that will be his responsibility over the next couple games, to be able to do that.”

Spivey started all 18 games last fall while Holler started nine of the 11 games he played in.

The only other BU defender available who has collegiate experience is senior defender Max White, who started six of the 13 games he appeared in last year. White played five minutes in each of the losses in North Carolina.

BU will look to bounce back from the absence of Madzongwe, but in a season in which the team needs to earn an at-large bid to make it to the NCAA tournament the loss of Madzongwe may severely hurt the Terriers’ chances at the postseason.

“It is going to take away from our whole team because he does so much,” Roberts said. “He is good on the ball, he is a good passer. So we have to make up for him.”