CLEVELAND, Miss. – UT Tyler scored three goals in the first half and preserved the shutout with a scoreless second half of a 3-0 road win over Delta State Sunday afternoon.
All three goals were scored by freshman, as midfielder
Michael Agyeman opened the scoring in the 13
th minute, while Darío Rossell added a goal in the 32
nd minute before
Luis Aguilar extended the lead to 3-0 with just over a minute remaining in the first half.
With the win, UT Tyler secured a split of its season-opening two-game road trip to even its record at 1-1 in the Patriots' first year of NCAA Division II provisional membership. Delta State falls to 0-1.
How It Happened: Agyeman converted on UT Tyler's second shot of the game, with
Nathaniel Lopez registering an assist on the early game-winner in the 13
th minute. Rossell's 32
nd-minute goal was unassisted and finished off a flurry of chances for the Patriots, who fired off four shots and a pair of corner kicks in a span of less than four minutes leading up to Rossell's score.
The UT Tyler defense limited Delta State to just one shot over the final 26 minutes of the first half, and the consistent attacking pressure produced another goal late in the period, when Aguilar scored in the 44
th minute to give the Patriots a 3-0 halftime lead.
By The Numbers: UT Tyler generated a 16-8 advantage in shots, and the teams were even in corner kicks with four each… A total of 22 Patriots saw game action in Sunday's win, with 11 different players registering at least one shot… Rossell took a game-high four shots, while Agyeman and
Ramiro Alvarez took two shots each…
Parker O'Quinn made a pair of first-half saves before freshman
Cameron Bayer finished off the cleansheet with a scoreless second half… Delta State goalkeeper Mattis Kloepper made five saves.
What's Next: The Patriots are off from game action for the next week, returning to the field for three consecutive home games, starting with the 2019 home opener on Tuesday, Sept. 19, in a non-conference matchup with Texas College, an NAIA school also located in Tyler.
Quotable (UT Tyler head coach Kenny Jones): "Individually, our skill level is good, so our challenge as a group is how can we make good decisions to get the team in a good position to score and be consistent defensively when we don't have the ball. A lot of our growth is going to be in areas not related to soccer skill. We are working on decision making and the ability to work hard, and for a team with a lot of new and young players, we're asking them to find out how to push themselves as fast as they can physically while thinking slowly and calmly."
"The big focus of the second half for us was the shutout. We could have really gotten complacent with a three-goal lead, but the shutout is the most important thing when you have the lead at that point. Learning how to shift gears to win the game is a part of learning to win, so this game provided us with some lessons to be learned there."
"At this point, experience is still our biggest challenge. Our growth as a team is about getting on the same page and maximizing our individual skills in order to maximize our team performances. We had better stretches today than we did in our previous games in being consistent with good decisions, and getting better in longer moments of consistency is what we're working on right now. We're asking these guys to grow a lot in a fairly small amount of time."
