There’s that old saying that the early bird gets the worm. Well, the early bird was the Marquette women’s soccer team and the worm consisted of victories over Nebraska (2-1) and Wisconsin-Milwaukee (4-0) at Valley Fields on Sunday.
The Golden Eagles were the early bird in that they put their stamp upon both games early on. They took the fight to the Cornhuskers and the Panthers.
“We want to set the tone of the game right away and play the way we want to play,” junior forward Ashley Bares said. “We don’t want to have to play to their level and how they want to play. We want them to play the game we want to (play). Setting the tone right away makes a huge difference.”
Against Nebraska the Golden Eagles had three scoring chances in the first seven minutes of action and two corner kicks in the first 12 minutes — their first goal of the game, by sophomore midfielder Kristi Laurenzi, came off of a corner kick.
By the end of the first half of the Nebraska game the Golden Eagles were up 2-0, and they had 10 corner kicks compared to Nebraska’s zero.
In the game against UW-Milwaukee, the Golden Eagles scored two goals in the first 10 minutes of the game. Marquette put a dagger through both teams’ hearts before they even really got beating.
Part of why Nebraska and later UW-Milwaukee had so many problems getting anything going offensively, was because Marquette possessed the ball for much of both games.
“If you try to play your game, then you can break them down with your possessions,” coach Markus Roeders said. “Part of the reason we’re trying to possess the ball is that if you’re really good at it, we feel like we can pull the other teams apart — we can make them chase us.”
Despite ball control for most of both games, Roeders thought his team could have done better on varying how they possessed the ball with less vertical and more side-to-side movement. He added that becoming more balanced in that area will help Marquette keep teams off balance in the future.
What went well most of the day was Marquette’s aggressiveness. The team continually outworked its opponents for possession of the ball and was constantly on the attack.
“We want to be the aggressor for 90 minutes plus,” Roeders said. “We don’t want to give any wiggle room. We don’t just want to be the aggressor for like 40 minutes and then we’re taking off the next 20. We have to consistently be the aggressor. We just can’t let up.”
Letting up became a minor problem near the end of the game against UW-Milwaukee once the Golden Eagles were up 4-0, after two first half goals by Bares and goals by freshman midfielder Sam Vicker and sophomore forward Rachael Sloan in the second half.
“At the end of the UWM game it got slow and boring,” Sloan said. “We need to work on playing hard up until the last whistle.”
