In its visit to the desert, Dartmouth scored one goal early and tried to make that stand up until the end. It didn’t work on Thursday against Arizona State, but the Big Green got their lone goal to hold up against Arizona on Sunday in a 1-0 victory.
“I think this was a good organized defensive team,” said Arizona head coach Becca Moros. “And, really, we needed to beat them. They weren’t going to beat themselves, and I think that’s where we could have been better.”
The Big Green almost managed to defeat
both Arizona programs. They scored on a penalty kick against ASU in the 42nd minute in their first game. The Sun Devils got an equalizer in the 90th minute to escape with the draw.
The team from New Hampshire got things started much earlier against the Wildcats. The Big Green earned a corner kick in the 12th minute. It was played perfectly in front of the goal and knocked into the net by Michal Cagungun early in the 13th minute.
It was the only shot taken by Dartmouth all match. It was one of just two corner kicks earned by the Big Green. On the other end, Arizona took 14 shots with five on goal and earned six corner kicks. The Wildcats seemed far more dangerous throughout the match, but it didn’t matter.
“I think ultimately we did enough to win the game,“ Moros said. ”Set piece killed us. That’s the way it is across college soccer. I mean, we talk about it all the time…but set pieces can really turn a game one way or the other, and I think that we’ll have to learn from that one. I think we could have done better on that, too, but credit to them for putting it in the back of the net, and we weren’t able to.“
After going ahead, Dartmouth didn’t push forward much. The Big Green had a few counterattacking opportunities but were mostly content to simply make sure Arizona didn’t get too much space. The Wildcats’ tactics were successful in producing more opportunities; they weren’t successful in doing anything with those opportunities.
“We knew that they would play pretty packed in and tight at times, and I think we tried a couple things,” Moros said. “You know, we played a little bit longer in the first half, looking to try to sort of not give them too much time to settle in, and then in the second half, we tried to play a little bit through the middle more, which in the end I think was was probably more effective than playing longer. But I thought we were in the attacking third enough times to create more opportunities and put more things on frame.”
The experience left one thing with the Wildcat players, but they hope it’s something that can help in the long run.
“I’m not gonna lie,” said defender Zoe Mendiola. “It was a bit frustrating. Definitely, some things that we need to work on throughout the game, and I don’t think this is something that we’re gonna let go of necessarily. I think it’s a good learning lesson, something that we can get on film and focus on the technical details that we could have done better, and just take it with us to bring our momentum into the Big 12 and to the rest of our games.”
