No. 12 Cougars edge Cats in UA's last non-conference home game
Defeating nationally ranked opponents seems to be the BYU soccer team's forte this season.
The No. 12 Cougars' match against the No. 24 Arizona soccer team furthered that point, as BYU won 2-1 Saturday night at Murphey Stadium in the Wildcats' last non-conference home game of 2005.
The Wildcats (5-3-2) are the fourth ranked team the Cougars have defeated since Sept. 12, and Saturday's victory kept BYU (10-0-1) undefeated, with their only tie coming Sept. 24 against Eastern Washington.
"I thought performancewise we played well enough to win tonight. We just didn't," said Arizona head coach Dan Tobias. "A lot of that credit goes to BYU. They're a very good team.
"They've been knocking off a lot of good teams, and I guess we're on that list now," he said.
Senior midfielder-forward Mallory Miller came through at home yet again for the Wildcats, scoring her 10th goal of the season and eighth at Murphey Stadium.
Game summary |
Saturday: No. 12 BYU defeats No. 24 Arizona 2-1 |
Miller only took one shot the entire game, running onto a pass and taking the ball into the box before netting it in the opposite corner past Cougar goalkeeper Erika Woodbury, who came too far off her line to try and cut down Miller's angle on the shot.
BYU scored its first goal at the 33:15 mark in the first half. A little over a minute later, Wildcat sophomore defender Kaity Heath picked up a yellow card after she booted the ball away in frustration after arguing with the referee over a foul called on her.
The Cougars finished off their scoring at 76:29, just seven seconds before Miller's goal. Both Cougar goals were unassisted and were the result of the Arizona defense's inability to clear the ball from danger.
The first score came off a Cougar throw-in deep into the box, and the second resulted from a corner kick that bounced around the box before being put in.
Tobias said that although Arizona has given up an atypically high eight goals in its last three games, he doesn't think it's a result of his defense's poor play.
He said he believes it is more a product of the opposing offense taking advantage of the one or two mistakes the Wildcats make in a game.
"I don't think we're doing anything exceptionally poorly that's leading to teams scoring goals on us," Tobias said. "I'd be worried if I felt like, 'Wow, teams are just creating chance after chance after chance.' I haven't felt that way in weeks."
This last non-conference game marked the return of senior midfielder Nikki David, who missed the UC-Santa Barbara game on Sept. 25 with a groin injury she suffered two days earlier against Portland, Ore.
David saw limited minutes on Saturday after she woke up to find the injury was still causing her trouble, she said.
Despite the loss, she said she thought the Wildcats took a step in the right direction.
"This is one of the best games we've ever played, even though the result didn't show it," David said. "Our heart, our urgency, everything was there. ... We just need to finalize everything."