The OOC game tonight is going to be another like Pine Bluff. We're going to score...a lot. A&M Commerce is still in their probationary jump to D1 period.
TU Women's Soccer Fall 2023
- Thread starter TU_BLA
- Start date
The game tonight should be much more competitive. The Commerce roster is filled with. a bunch of Dallas area ECRL girls with a few lower level NL girls mixed in. They also have an NL player (Ava Watts) who played at TSC. TU will have a significant talent edge but it won’t be Ark PB.
Yeah, 2-1 final for TU. I thought it was going to be a replay of the Pine Bluff game when TU scored a minute and a half into the game. TU dominated possession and chances really but then they'd lose a winger or take a chance defensively and miss and then they'd have to scramble around. A&M-Commerce wasn't very fast and they struggled to keep the ball but TU's backline just loses focus too much.
We’re better than last year imo. Roster has more talent. The OSU transfer is the real deal. We won’t win the conference thanks to Memphis but a top 1/3 finish in conference is realistic.
That's where we were last year...made it to the conference tournament. I'm not sure this squad has enough ball control to repeat last year's finish though. My best analogy is the basketball team losing the rebounding battle by 20+ but the game looks close because the other side can't hit the water from the boat.
Women are at Rice right now. So far I haven't seen TU leave their half of the field with possession. The other thing is Rice's field is terrible. WSA's River Parks fields would be comparable. BA's Indian Springs natural grass fields are better and TU's practice field makes this look like an unkempt city park, sort of like the West Bank complex.
The women fall 1-0 to Rice in the league opener. Rice scored on a really pretty cross to the head of a Rice player. TU had a few chances but nothing I would consider extremely dangerous.
Question for our resident goalie expert TU_BLA: There were multiple times during this game where the proper play for the TU back line is to play the ball back to the keeper and then reset and play out of the back. Didn’t see that occur a single time. We routinely would kick the ball out of bounds conceding possession. Why?
Question for our resident goalie expert TU_BLA: There were multiple times during this game where the proper play for the TU back line is to play the ball back to the keeper and then reset and play out of the back. Didn’t see that occur a single time. We routinely would kick the ball out of bounds conceding possession. Why?
It's more to do with the defense being terrible at controlling the ball and playing out of the back. Both the men's and women's teams have this bad habit of not passing with any pace. All the passes are too soft IMO and it invites problems. The men will play out of the back even if they are being hard pressed and it causes problems. The women don't. I have not seen it in any of the games I've watched the last two seasons. Everything is a clearance up over the top, even if no one is there. And I can't speak to the ability of the GK to play that style simply because I haven't seen it. But the primary reason is you don't trust your team to play out of the back. And we've seen that this team is not an accurate passing team either. That's a big problem if you're trying to play out of the back using the goalkeeper as the trigger. So it might not actually be the GKs problem at all.
Thanks for the response. My daughter’s team spends at minimum 2-3 hours per week practicing playing it out of the back and through the midfield. We probably play it back to the keeper no less than 5-8 times a game. Sometimes a lot more if the opponent is playing direct soccer. Just found it odd a D1 college team wasn’t doing this.
When my son played for Donovan Ricketts (U12, TSC), they would spend 30-40 minutes every practice just passing and Donovan always preached "firm passes! I need firm passes!". Then they'd spend another 45 minutes playing out of the back. They'd spend time doing it with no pressure on them so the backline, 6, and the GK got used to moving off the ball into proper spaces to be an outlet while they tried to find a crack through the front line who could just move side to side. Then he'd release the forwards to press. I'm pretty sure the boys were bored out of their minds doing the same simple things over and over at practice but I will tell you that by the end of the year, that team could play out of the back without thinking about it. People asked me how it was having an MLS keeper for a coach for my young GK and honestly, Donovan NEVER worked with him on GK technique in team practices...the only thing he worked with him on from a GK'ing perspective was "What do you see?" in terms of seeing how the defense was set up and how to break it down and I'm 100% convinced that is why my son is able to see and read the field like he's a coach.
Donovan often doubted his ability to teach and relate to young kids as a coach because, as he put it, I've never done it before and I've never done it from that young an age, he'd been around upper level national and pro clubs the majority of his life. What I learned was, teach kids the same concepts you would teach adults. They're young and sponges and absorb everything. And lo and behold, if you teach the right things and develop players, the winning takes care of itself.
I don't know much about soccer but I read an article that said that the most important differentiator of great vs not great goalies is their ability to set up their team to score, not their ability to stop goals. I recall it argued there are limited shots on goal and the majority of variability on whether a shot goes in is beyond the control of the goalie regardless of skill, so great goalies only make a difference of a few goals a year from stopping skill. But effectively setting up the offense produces much more increase in goals, so even a middling stopping goalie who sets up the offense well produces a net goal benefit for their team relative to a great stopping goalie who doesn't set up the offense well. Thoughts? I have no ability to evaluate the argument but generally think more scoring in soccer would be better so I liked the thought.
I think goalies being able to set up an offense is more of a factor in the men’s game than the women’s at the college level and below….at least from my observations. BLA is the resident goalie expert so I will defer to him. However, my observations from girls soccer is that goalies will primarily distribute the ball to the CBs and OBs with an occasionally pass to the 6 mixed in. Teams then rely on those back 5 find the space and play into the midfield. My daughter’s team practices switching the field in the back at almost every practice in order to open up space. If you have a goalie who’s good with her feet you can use her in those switches as well.
The girls lost 2-1 to OU in a fairly competitive game (especially the first half). We wore down in the second half as playing 7 or your 10 field players 90 minutes will tend to do. OU is much better. Outshot us 18-4 but the girls did show grit. We have some talent….especially up top. I still think we can make a run in conference.
She really enjoyed it. We walked around campus a bit after the game. The grounds really look good at night with everything lit up. Several of the parents of TU current players recognized her and stopped and talked to her. Left her with a really positive vibe.
See Lawpoke's response. Upper level GKs must be a 5th backline player to play through and relieve pressure in order to keep possession and help a team build out of the back. The best GKs can also see the vulnerabilities in the oppositions formation and figure out what they're trying to do so they can help their team defeat that. My son is actually excellent at that stuff. Had he been 6'1 instead of 5'11 and he's playing in college somewhere. The days of playing the pure shot stopper are done. If you can't play with the ball at your feet, you're not going very far.
If you want to see the difference go back and watch how Manuel Neuer was used at Bayern as well as on the German national team. Also, you can tell whether or not a GK is going to be good or not by 2 things: 1) Do they take their own goal kicks? If so move to question 2, if they don't you know the team struggles to play out of the back, and 2) Do the defenders play the ball back to the GK regularly when they are under pressure? This says the team values possession and they are confident in being able to keep it and work the ball out of the back with the GK as the trigger. A good example of this is TUs men's team with Alex Lopez in goal. Opponents will not press him when he has the ball because it's giving up a defender and TU can move the ball upfield quickly. The women's team does not do this. And rarely do you see the men's team punt the ball long distance or just hit long goal kicks.
The US is slightly behind in developing their GKs to play this way as usually the shot stopping is the value coaches look for at the youth levels here. Tim Howard wasn't particularly great with his feet but he was a superb shot stopper. Brad Guzan wasn't as good of a shot stopper but he had much better feet and distribution than Howard did. Right now the USMNT lacks GKs with even serviceable feet (IMO) for that level. It's a huge deficiency and problem. Whoever played GK vs Canada is probably the best with his feet in comparison to the others who have been getting call ups (Turner, Horvath, Steffen, Johnson).
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