Lady Miners blank Bearkats 5-0 Sunday

The SHSU women’s soccer team fell to 2-3-0 on the season as the University of Texas-El Paso Miners shut out the Bearkats 5-0 on Sunday. The Kats managed one shot during the match to UTEP’s 35 total shots.The Miners scored the game’s first goal in the fourth minute, and added another twenty minutes later. The Bearkats finished the first half with zero shots and trailing by three goals. “We played very poorly in the first half,” head coach Marcia Oliveira said. “We did not concentrate to do the things we had set out to do.”The Kats managed their only shot of the match from Kim Brown in the second half. The Miners added two goals in the 87th minute, one coming on a penalty kick.Oliveira said that when her team started to play more fluently in the second half, UTEP’s players changed to a more physical style of play. “The other team noticed that we started producing, and they started to really be very rough,” Oliveira said.UTEP’s physical play resulted in a team total of 20 fouls, one of which was a yellow card. The Bearkats received three yellow cards and one red card on a total of 10 fouls. Oliveira said she thought uneven officiating was one of the reasons the Bearkats were never able to perform at the level she expected.”We pretty much got slammed by the lack of fairness from the referee and the lack of sportsmanship from the other team,” Oliveira said. “That just adds to the bite.”Oliveira also cited her own players’ failure to play up to their potentials as a reason for the loss. “We underperformed,” Oliveira said. “UTEP is not at the level of SMU or OSU. We scored against those teams, but we could not score against UTEP.”Oliveira said the team will work in practice this week to improve offensively, and to maintain in-game focus. “There’s a lot of homework we need to do,” Oliveira said. “I think we can fix the little the little things we were unable to show, and we can go back to being intense, but we need to be intense with a purpose.”Up next for the Bearkats is a rematch with Texas Southern on Friday. SHSU blanked TSU 17-0 when they last played two weeks ago.