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Marquette and Pepperdine Play to a Scoreless Draw
Sept. 21, 2008
MILWAUKEE -
After 110 minutes of play, the Marquette women's soccer team was unable to come away with a result against Pepperdine Sunday afternoon at Valley Fields. With the tie, the Golden Eagles stand at 5-3-1 overall on the season, while Pepperdine heads back to Malibu, Calif., with a 3-4-2 record. "It was not our best performance of the season," said head coach Markus Roeders. Without making excuses, I thought we had an emotional result on Friday with playing the road, the game being our BIG EAST opener and winning in overtime. Our `achilles heal' is our youth and trying to finish goals, and it showed today. We are asking a lot of our younger players up top and in the midfield, and that is still a work in progress. However, we are very difficult to score on and at some point in time we are going to break it open for two, maybe three goals." For the game, Marquette owned the shots advantage, 15-10, but Pepperdine had the upper hand in the shots on goal category, 4-2. Freshman goalkeeper Natalie Kulla played the entire 110 minutes and made three saves. Kulla pushed her scoreless streak in net to 292:53. Pepperdine keeper Kayla Stolte saved two shots for the game. Neither team could create a good rhythm in the first half resulting in much of the play being at midfield. Marquette took five shots in the first half and its lone opportunity came on a cross from junior Michelle Compty to freshman Danielle Martens inside the box. Martens tried to turn the ball, lost control and her possession was knocked away. The Golden Eagles defense stayed strong in the second half and smothered any attempted the Waves took including a block of 20 minutes where Pepperdine was awarded five corner kicks. "It was sloppy and I thought they had better spells in the second half. Overall, we made some mental mistakes that were uncharacteristic of our team," said Roeders. For the remaining 15 minutes of regulation, the Golden Eagles pushed forward and created a couple of opportunities. Freshman Lindsey Page registered a shot that went wide as did sophomore Lauren Thut, and sophomore Ashley Bares had her shot blocked by the Waves' defense in the final minutes. Bares had Marquette's best two chances in overtime in the opening 1:34 in the extra frame. Her first shot hit the crossbar and her second sailed wide. Thut and sophomores Rosie Malone-Povolny and Lauren Acree also registered shots for the Golden Eagles in overtime. Kulla came up with a big save of Amanda Rupp's shot in the 95th minute. "Give both teams credit. They battled, we battled and it probably was a just result at the end," said Roeders. The Golden Eagles will resume BIG EAST Conference play Thursday, Sept. 25, at Providence.
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