Win and likely be in as the eighth and final seed in the Big 12 Tournament: This is the position ASU soccer finds itself in heading into its final regular-season match of the year. Not to mention, they'll be on the road fighting for the Territorial Cup against archrivals UA.
ASU controls its own destiny at this point, and it seems almost poetic that a season undermined by injury comes down to one Thursday night in Tucson. It's the most important game of the year, but the Sun Devils deal with the weight of the matchup by viewing it as just that: one game.
"I would word it as expectations," senior goalkeeper Pauline Nelles said. "For tomorrow's game, we expect to win. We have the pressure to win from the outside."
As it currently sits, ASU is in a four-way tie with Houston, BYU and Cincinnati for eighth place in the Big 12 standings. They have 11 points each and there is one game remaining in every team's schedule. But the Sun Devils have a tiebreaker advantage in their head-to-head record against these teams.
ASU opened up conference play by defeating then-No.10 BYU 2-1 on Sept. 18 and later beat Cincinnati 1-0 on Oct. 2, so if ASU wins against UA, they would automatically qualify ahead of those two teams. The Sun Devils didn't have the chance to play Houston this year, but the Cougars also have their toughest game of the season against No. 5 TCU on Oct. 30; ASU just lost to them, 1-2, on Oct. 26.
Given a Houston loss and an ASU win, the Sun Devils can almost guarantee themselves a spot in the Big 12 Tournament based on points, alongside their tiebreakers.
"It has to be very complicated for us to win our game and not make the playoffs," head coach Graham Winkworth said. "We control our destiny. I'd rather be in our shoes than their shoes going into these games."
Facing UA in this type of situation just adds fuel to the fire. ASU is 1-9 in their last 10 outings against the Wildcats, with a lone 3-2 win back in 2022, and it's been nearly a decade since the Sun Devils took a game in Tucson.
For many seniors, especially those with local roots, the implications of this game go beyond the impact it will have on the standings.
"Regardless of the Big 12 tournament, this game is the most important game of the year for us," senior midfielder Tatum Thomason said. "We want to be the school in Arizona, and the Territorial Cup is super important. I grew up here. My entire family went to ASU. It means just as much for me as it does for people (who) have been here four years."
The magnitude of the game also comes at a time when ASU isn't as dominant as it was at the beginning of the year. The Sun Devils are 1-4-1 in their last six matchups after starting the season 8-0-1.
Even though ASU's final score of 1-2 against a top-10 team in TCU looks close, the Horned Frogs took 18 more shots, five more shots on goal and controlled 62% of the possessions. For Winkworth, it's all about simplifying the processes through which his team gets back on track.
"We need to make better decisions in our build, which we tried working on earlier today, to be a little bit more comfortable and get back to what we were doing at the beginning of the season," Winkworth said. "We were able to find ... Tatum a lot more easily early in the season, but teams have decided to read the way we build, taking her out of the game, and so we need to be able to go down both sides of the pitch, and we can."
The ball's in ASU's court, or field, but whether the team can capitalize on its chance remains to be seen.
Edited by Alan Deutschendorf, Henry Smardo and Pippa Fung.
Reach the reporter at pvallur2@asu.edu and follow @PrathamValluri on X.
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Pratham Valluri is a sports reporter at The State Press. He is a junior majoring in sports journalism with a business minor. He’s in his 5th semester with The State Press working previously as an opinion writer.
