by Justin Goodrum
Daily Lobo
One hundred ten minutes just wasn't enough time to find the goal.
The UNM women's soccer team played the Montana Grizzlies to a 0-0 tie after 90 minutes and two 10-minute overtimes in its season opener Friday night.
The Lobos' game plan was to exploit Montana's defense by taking the ball out wide and then attacking the middle, senior Nicole McCarty said.
Head coach Kit Vela said she wanted her team to keep the pressure on the Grizzlies' defense the entire game.
"They play a trap which I haven't seen in a long time," she said. "They play very direct. They don't look to play soccer at all and so we were trying to outplay them by finding the ball wide, move diagonals and get in behind."
The Lobos had more shots on goal than the Grizzlies during regulation and had multiple chances to break the tie during the middle of the first half with a shot by Katelyn Ley and with a shot by Hannah Hand in the second half.
With both teams unable to score, the match went into overtime with Montana controlling most of the tempo by having two shots on goal.
Vela said her team could have executed better in the overtime periods.
"I just felt that we could have pulled it out," she said. "We almost did a couple of times, and then I think the second overtime, the girls were like, 'Let's get through the second overtime and not lose, instead of going at them,'" she said.
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Even though the Lobos ended with the tie, assistant coach Jorge Vela said the match was one the team should have won.
"It's not the result we wanted, because we want to win them all," he said. "But last year we go to their place, we get destroyed 3-1 and now we were actually ahead of them in every area."
Some questionable calls might have led to the Lobos' inability to score any goals, Kit Vela said.
"We were making some good diagonal runs with our forwards and the linesmen kept calling us offside and they weren't," she said. "Maybe one was offside. I look forward to seeing the tape because I don't think that they were all off."
McCarty said the Lobos will be able to take some lessons they learned against Montana and apply them to the rest of the season.
"We faced a little adversity," she said. "We had a few little problems with lineups, and we got through that, fought through everything and stayed together as a team."
