Fifteen minutes into Auburn’s soccer match with UAB, the Tigers already had a suffocating stranglehold on the Blazers.
Silvana Poulter collected the ball at the right corner of the field. As she began to calculate how she could put her team in the best position to score, a defender draped in dark green charged at her. She reacted without hesitation.
Once the defender got close enough, Poulter, with ease, slid the ball through the legs of the opposition, made a quick pass to Jaylen Gadson for the score, leaving the UAB defender on her knees and watching helplessly as her team went down 2-0.
This summarized the night for UAB as it went on to get shut out in a 6-0 barn-buster Friday evening in Auburn.
The six goals came from six different Auburn players. You could say they were firing on all cylinders, but this is nothing new for this 2018 Auburn team, which is undefeated on the season (3-0) and is outscoring opponents 12-1.
“I thought we had a little bit of lull there in the first half,” head coach Karen Hoppa said. “We still need to be better in our speed of play.”
They say a coach is never satisfied and that seems to be the case with Hoppa here. Her team scored their first goal in the first two minutes of the game and ended the first half up 3-0. If there was a lull, it sure wasn’t visible.
With Auburn having such a dominant control on the game, it was able to rotate through its players in order to give them all more in-game experience. All three of the Tigers’ goalkeepers got minutes. Unfortunately for them, the defense was so stout that UAB could only muster one shot on goal.
“I thought our defense was really tidy,” Hoppa said. “There’s a lot of things we want to replicate and a lot of things we want to get better at. The next game is the most important game.”
The six goals are the most in a game for the Tigers in 10 years. Auburn’s next game is on Sunday at home against UL-Lafayette before it leaves the state for a California road trip, taking on Long Beach State and Cal State Fullerton next weekend.
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Bryce Johnson is a junior Journalism major at Auburn University from Santa Monica, CA. He works as a sports writer for The Plainsman.
- @Brycejohnson310
- bzj0020@auburn.edu
