Like the game itself, the goal UCLA scored to beat San Diego wasn’t pretty.
With the score knotted at 0-0 in the 78th minute of the second half, junior forward Kara Lang received a pass from junior forward Lauren Cheney and dribbled the ball deep into the right corner of the field.
Hugging the out-of-bounds line, Lang managed to cross the ball from an awkward angle into the box, where it bounced off the back of a San Diego player and snuck over the goalie’s head for an own goal.
It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
“We played the ball into the forwards, I made a run wide, Cheney laid it off to me, and I just kept trying to get in-line,” Lang said. “She stopped me once, and then I won the ball back and tried again and finally it worked. I beat her down the line and crossed it in.
“It was definitely a sigh of relief.”
The Bruins sent the Toreros home from the NCAA Tournament with a 1-0 win Monday night at Drake Stadium, thanks in large part to some halftime adjustments.
Lang’s strategy to go out wide was exactly what coach Jill Ellis asked her team to do after a frustrating first half. The Toreros did their best to stop the Bruins’ offensive attack and tendency to play the ball forward by dropping several defenders behind the ball throughout the game. That strategy largely worked until the Bruins were able to mount an attack from the wings and turn the defense outside late in the game.
“When you’ve gotten up the back and you look up and you see their whole team is clogging the middle, there’s not much you can do,” Lang said. “We defiantly like to play the ball forward, and when we can’t do that, we needed to find another option. Wide was our only other option. We were trying to jam it down the middle too much.”
Defensively the Bruins recorded another shutout, but even that wasn’t easy. Goalkeeper Ashley Thompson made several important saves, including one diving stop in the 89th minute when a loose ball found its way into the box.
“It was a little more hectic because there was a bit more pressure than normal and a couple awkward bounces,” Thompson said.
So while Ellis was happy that her team could snatch a victory even when she didn’t think it wasn’t playing its best, she saw quite a few things that need work before the Bruins take on the Trojans at home this weekend in the third round.
“We didn’t take care of the ball, we didn’t connect passes, we weren’t disciplined, we kept going straight down the gut,” Ellis said. “Just little things.”
The intensity of Monday’s game should provide a good warm-up for the passion the Trojans will bring to Drake on Saturday.
Intensity on the field and in the stands built as the game, still tied, neared its conclusion.
In the 55th minute, a San Diego player slapped the ball out of a UCLA player’s hands after a disputed line call that resulted in a throw-in.
Fans yelled after every whistle, of which there were few, until the 75th minute, when the referee stopped the game. He went over to the bleachers and said, “You can disagree with my calls, but don’t call me names; don’t call me midget.”
When Thompson was asked what she expects the USC game this weekend to be like, her answer was trite.
“Filled with emotion,” she said.