STARKVILLE — Aaron Gordon could tell Mallory Eubanks wasn’t convinced.
Two years ago, the Mississippi State women’s soccer coach was trying to explain the benefits of high pressure to his standout forward, but Eubanks didn’t see the point if her efforts weren’t helping the Bulldogs win possession of the ball.
Eubanks appears to have changed her thinking two games into the 2016 season. That’s because the junior forward no longer is one of a few players stepping to opponents to help MSU dictate the tempo. Increased depth and athleticism has the Bulldogs ready to apply the pressure Gordon wants to help them make the opposition uncomfortable and to help them generate scoring opportunities.
That’s exciting news for Eubanks, who led MSU in scoring last season with 10 points (three goals, four assists).
“This year, just knowing you have the full commitment from everyone on the field has just pushed you and drives you to pressure the ball because someone else is working just as hard as you to step up to the next player,” Eubanks said. “That helped me understand why we needed to do it, and it has gained us a lot of attacks from defensive pressure.”
MSU saw effective results from that strategy last weekend in a season-opening 2-0 victory against College of Charleston and a 2-1 loss to then-No. 17 Virginia Tech in Charleston, South Carolina. MSU will look to employ a similar work rate this weekend when it kicks off the home portion of its 2016 schedule at 7 p.m. Friday against Lipscomb at the MSU Soccer Field. It will wrap up the weekend with a match against Tennessee-Martin at 1 p.m. Sunday.
MSU nearly swept the opening weekend thanks to a goal by freshman forward MaKayla Waldner, who scored off a rebound of a shot by Eubanks in the 82nd minute. Unfortunately, Virginia Tech capitalized on a penalty kick in the 89th minute to tie the match and then scored in the 90th minute to escape.
Gordon said his team could have been more deliberate in the final minutes, but he said the loss was a learning experience for the players and the coaches.
“The only thing I think we showed in that six minutes was a little bit of naivete in terms of killing the time off,” Gordon said. “A hopeful ball in the box that no one got on their head led to a scramble where, unfortunately, we gave up a penalty, which wasn’t a really dangerous chance at all.
“Then the next domino fell where with a minute-and-a-half left instead of trying to get to overtime I think they had a sense of they could win this and we had a sense of what just happened? We just didn’t recover. They got another free kick that led to the goal. Even in the last 30 seconds of the game we were attacking and had a half-chance. It was hard. It would have been the biggest win for the program since I arrived, and probably the biggest win in the program’s history in regard to playing an ACC opponent, and a top-20 opponent.”
Gordon said the Bulldogs set the tone in the opening minute by stealing a pass and forcing a corner kick. He felt MSU was willing “to play on the front foot” all evening against the No. 17 team in the nation. Virginia Tech, which beat LSU 1-0 in its other game last week, slipped one spot to No. 18 in this week’s National Soccer Coaches Association of American (NSCAA) rankings.
Gordon said his team’s fitness level and its depth have been keys to being able to increase the defensive intensity. MSU used at least 19 players in its exhibition victories against Memphis and Iowa State and its first two-regular season matches.
“The game (against Virginia Tech) was pretty even,” Gordon said. “We dominated at points. They dominated at points. I think the thing was we really took them out of what they wanted to do, or what they thought they were going to be able to do against us, which was possess the ball. I think they wanted to dictate the terms of the game, and we talked about it before the game that on absolute terms we were going to try to dictate the pace in terms of how we would defend and press and we would not sit back.”
Eubanks said the team started to adopt Gordon’s attacking mentality last season. She feels the 2016 team has an even better grasp of what Gordon wants it to do and how that pressure will affect opponents. She came away encouraged from “I think it is just the mentality of our team to always go 100 percent,” Eubanks said. “Virginia Tech is a nationally ranked team that is used to passing the ball and dictating the tempo. They want to play pretty soccer, and we put them under pressure and made them feel uncomfortable. We made them lose their tempo, which helped us.”
Eubanks said the Bulldogs set that standard in the spring and carried it into preseason workouts in the summer. She said the players on this season’s team are more willing to hold their teammates to the high standard of competing and tackling every day. She said Gordon reinforces that notion and has convinced the Bulldogs that style of play will produce results.
Gordon hopes more of those results come this weekend. He said he was pleased to see his team overcome a nearly two-hour delay against College of Charleston that forced the team to alter its normal routine because the coaches realized the team’s pregame meal wouldn’t last the players. Still, the Bulldogs used goals by Johanna Hamblett and Khalyn Harmon to overcome the heat and the humidity.
“I don’t think we played necessarily the best game we can play,” Gordon said. “A lot of things led to us not putting together a performance, but we played OK and got a good result, so I was happy about it.
“We scored at the end of both halves. I think that is a sign of focus and contributions from players coming off the bench because that is usually when they’re coming into the game, and maybe our fitness level was pretty good, too.”
Gordon said “the emotion of being in the lead” affected his team late against Virginia Tech. Still, he said the team has taken ownership of the final eight minutes of that match and has moved on. He said all of the attention has turned to Lipscomb and making sure it can apply the same kind of pressure to play the match at its tempo.
“I think we have enough athletes on our team that we can press people in a way that will make them uncomfortable and that is the identity that I have always wanted, but having it and doing it are two different things,” Gordon said. “You have to have a team buy-in, too, and that process has occurred, too. I think we will do it as long as our legs will hold up. Pressing is a daunting task in two games like that, and Virginia Tech was a great opportunity to find out if we could against a really good team on Sunday. A really good team can make you chase a lot. When you put a team under pressure and commit to it, sometimes there is no plan B for that team, and that is what we kind of found out with them. Maybe we just caught them on the right day, but I want to give our team a lot more credit than that because from the opening kickoff we didn’t sit back. Not that sitting back is bad, but I think sitting back would be bad for our team.”
It also would be bad if players like Eubanks, who is one of the team leaders, didn’t buy into the idea of high pressure. Eubanks’ transformation has helped her become a driving force to the Bulldogs’ attacking brand of soccer. Gordon hopes Eubanks and Waldner, a four-star recruit from Dexter, Missouri, will continue to learn how to play together and that the Bulldogs will reap the benefits from their depth and athleticism. He also said the addition of Johanna Hamblett, who is from New Zealand, has solidified the midfield and improved the team’s awareness.
“We got quicker, we got more athletic, and I can put more athletes on the field,” Gordon said. “There is a mentality with the kids that we have that they are just willing to chase the lost cause down. That is a teaching approach because Mallory would be the first one to say when she got here that she wasn’t that interested in pressuring people. She would be like, ‘Why am I doing this? We’re pressuring it but we’re not winning the ball.’ Last year, I thought was her real eye-opener to understand that pressure means pressing in 100 percent because that speeds up the clock for that player on the ball to make a decision and really have the right touch to make the right pass. If everyone is really keyed in on that, we have an opportunity to win back the ball. Last year, we had two or three people who could do that. Now we have many more who can do that, and we are fast in the back, which means your line could be higher in the back if you are pressing. If you play a high line, you have to be able to deal with that.”
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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