Soccer: Offensive barrage leads A&M to 6-1 win over San Diego

The Texas A&M football team is known for scoring in droves.

On Friday night, the ‘other’ football team did a little scoring of their own against the visiting San Diego Toreros in their first game of the Texas A&M Invitational.

Behind a season high six goals, the No. 24 Texas A&M soccer team defeated the Toreros 6-1 in front of 1,818 fans at Ellis Field to move to 3-2 on the season. Prior to the match, the Aggies had just five goals all season.

“Hopefully this has uncorked the genie from the bottle a little bit,” said A&M head coach G Guerrieri. “We’ve created a lot of chances to do that in the past, but tonight we had really good finishes. 6-1 is not predicative of this game, I thought San Diego was fantastic. When we get rolling, we can be pretty darn dangerous.”

In the 31st minute, A&M forward Annie Kunz broke the scoreless tie with her first goal of the season – a rocket into the bottom left corner of the net past a diving San Diego goalie. Kunz was shaken up on the play after being contacted in the head, but remained in the game after a short stop in play.

Shortly after the start of the second half, San Diego found the equalizer off the foot of forward Emily Dillon after a defensive lapse on the part of the A&M backline to knot the score at 1-1.

“We still have a ways to go [defensively],” stated Guerrieri. “We gave up one goal to a good attacking team tonight and I’m not going to not take that. But there are points where we need to do better.

“On the goal, we dove at the ball and the girl got behind us and scored. We need to be a little more patient and let the game come to us instead of taking ourselves out of position.”

But after the San Diego goal, it was all A&M until the end of the contest.

With just under 28 minutes remaining in the game, A&M forward Kelley Monogue connected on the first of two back-to-back goals when she received a cross from Bianca Brinson and redirected the ball into the back of the net.

Less than 10 minutes later, Monogue added her second of the game, this time off a great cross from junior Leigh Edwards to make the score 3-1 A&M. The pair of goals give Monogue four scores in the past three games.

“Kelley has been outstanding,” said Guerrieri of Monogue. “She had a great preseason and is coming off of a really good spring. If you take last fall out of it, because she was recovering from knee surgery, and put what she’s doing now with what she did her freshman year, she’s one of the best players in the country and we’re glad we have her.”

Not to be outdone, Edwards connected on possibly the best goal of the season less than two minutes later to give A&M the 4-1 advantage. After an A&M cross that was deflected by a San Diego player, Edwards let loose on the ball from 20 yards out and just snuck it under the crossbar and over the outstretched hands of the San Diego goalie.

“Leigh had a really nice goal,” said Guerrieri. “She hit it like a rocket from about [20 yards].”

The Aggies would go on to add two more goals in the final five minutes of play from Janae Cousineau and Liz Keester to bring the final score to 6-1. Keester picked up the assist on Cousineau’s goal, while defender Karlie Mueller assisted Keester.

Now A&M must turn their focus to what should be a very heated match with the No. 9 Baylor Bears on Sunday afternoon. Baylor defeated Missouri 2-1 in their first game of the tournament and come in to Sunday’s match with a perfect 5-0 record on the season.