Quotes From Head Soccer Coach Felix Oskam
September 26, 2000 | Women's Soccer
Sept. 26, 2000
LUBBOCK, Texas - "It was a tough weekend for us. Obviously, it's hard to play on the road against Texas A&M and Texas, two Big 12 Conference games. It seems like our team is playing for 45 minutes each game. The game consists of two 45-minute halves. We have to be able to play a 90-minute game."
"Against Texas A&M in the first half, maybe we were intimidated by A&M, by the crowd, by their whole aura they have over there (College Station). We just didn't play well. I told them at halftime to just play with them. When you play with them, you'll be OK, and that's what we did in the second half. They only had two chances in the second half. They scored on one of them. We played much, much better in the second half, and it gave our kids confidence that we could play with the 10th-ranked team in the country."
"We told them let's build on the second half we played against A&M to go into Texas on Sunday, because Texas had a tough game on Friday against Colorado, where they beat Colorado in double overtime. Sunday in the first half we played very well. We hung in there. We outshot Texas in the first half, which is good to see. In the second half we fell apart. It almost seems like we were giving up or can't go the 90 minutes."
"That's the frustrating part. The whole frustrating part of the season so far is that when things go bad, everything goes bad. We do outshoot most of the opponents, but we hit the post in a lot of games. You get some calls that don't go your way, so everything goes from bad to worse. We just need to find a way to play the 90 minutes, to keep working hard and to maybe force something good to happen to this team. This team deserves a win, but we just have to fight and play for 90 minutes. It's not going to get easier with this upcoming weekend with Oklahoma and Oklahoma State."
"Oklahoma had a great win against Kansas last Friday, beating them 4-0. Oklahoma State just lost to Missouri, 1-0, and last year Missouri was a nationally-ranked team. It's going to be very tough to play against those Oklahoma teams. We just need to do a better job of two things: we need to defend better and finish better. At least do one of the two well, and we're not doing it right now. We're not defending well. We're not finishing well. We're not finishing off the chances we create. We've got to find a way to defend well or finish well. We've got to put the ball in the net, so that's what we're going to work on this week, to get this group back on track and hopefully they will get the confidence to beat Oklahoma."
"These two home games are huge for us right now. We're 0-2 in the Big 12. We're still in it to go to San Antonio [for the Big 12 Tournament] at the end of the season. It has to start this coming Friday against Oklahoma."