Ohio coach Aaron Rodgers still hasn’t met one of his major season goals: his team playing a complete 90-minute game.
The Bobcats have played in spurts all season and have squandered the opportunity to win several games. As few as five bad minutes cost the Bobcats potential points against the likes of Miami and Ball State already this season.
For the most part, the Bobcats have had their best stretches of play in the second half of games. They have scored 16 of their 22 goals after the halftime break and have only four goals against during that period.
The Bobcats have not allowed a second half-goal since their game against Niagara on Sept. 6, which amounts to 486 minutes of mistake-free second-half soccer. The second half has not been the problem so far this season for Ohio — it has been the team’s slow starts.
“We have started slowly,” said Rodgers. “We’ve scored three times as many goals in the second half as we’ve given up, and we’ve given up three times as many as we’ve scored in the first half.”
The Bobcats have only scored six times in the first half this season, and they have allowed 12 goals in the first 45 minutes of play.
Their first-half results have put them behind the eight ball early, forcing them to claw back into the game after halftime. Rodgers’ new 90-minute approach, what Ohio calls “90 like eight,” has tried to solve the problem of coming out of the gates slowly.
“We were down 1-0 with eight minutes left and we came back and scored two goals,” said senior midfielder Maggie Murnane of a game situation that inspired the strategy. “The way we played in those eight minutes is how Aaron wants us to play the whole 90 minutes — just going all out, talking, running to get the ball, being the aggressor, not playing defensively but offensively, sliding to get the ball in the box.”
When playing its best the entire game, Ohio can hang with some of the country’s top competition, as evidenced by how well the Bobcats played against Indiana, which is currently 42nd in the RPI. Ohio lost 1-0 against the Hoosiers in its season-opener on Aug. 23, but played 65 good minutes of good soccer against them, Rodgers said.
“It will be validation for me personally — of all the hard work that we’ve gone through and really the system that we have been integrating,” Rodgers said. “It will also mean for the team that all of their hard work has been paying off, and all the things that we have been throwing at them mentally and physically they are all actually able to put it into practice. I think their confidence will soar at that point.”
Rodgers’ confidence in his system is emulated by his players, who believe once it clicks that they will be a force to be reckoned with.
“Once we get to that point I think our team will be so confident,” said junior outside back Tonya Frasik. “We will come out every game like we did the last eight minutes that we play at the end of our halves. If we play our game, the whole 90 minutes, we possibly couldn’t be scored on.”
@Kovarandrew
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