The Alabama Crimson Tide failed to earn a victory in its SEC opener, but played Georgia to a 1-1 draw to maintain its undefeated record.
Both goals came in the first 15 minutes of action, with early blows exchanged by forward Gianna Paul and Georgia midfielder Nicole Vernis. This marked Paul’s sixth goal of the season, moving her into a three-way tie for first in the SEC alongside South Carolina’s Catherine Barry and Tennessee’s Kameron Simmonds.
“Gianna’s been incredible,” head coach Wes Hart said. “Six goals in nine games is pretty damn good.”
Alabama has just 11 goals on the season, meaning that Gianna Paul has accounted for over 50% of the team’s scoring.
Although his squad is ranked seventh in the nation, Hart said he believes it hasn’t reached its full potential.
“It’s exciting knowing that we’re not even playing our best soccer and we’re still a top 10 team in the country,” Hart said in an uncharacteristically long answer during his postgame interview. “Our ranking is seven, nine games in, no losses, I’m sure there’s 350 teams in college soccer that would trade places with us in a heartbeat. We’ve kind of become victims of our own success, much like Bama football. And not by any means am I putting ourselves in that category. But you have a season like we did last year, and the expectation is ‘Oh, my God, why aren’t you winning every game?’ Look, because winning is hard. They’re [Georgia] a good team, it’s an SEC game. But I leave excited knowing there’s more in us and we’re still a pretty damn good team right now.”
This was a cut-and-dry contest. Two very good SEC teams went out on the pitch, gave it their all, and neither could come away with the victory. There were no controversial moments, no heated exchanges between players, and no real statistical trends or anomalies to report on, except that Georgia was called offsides a whopping nine times throughout the game.
Overall, it appears to be smooth sailing in Tuscaloosa, with the entire squad seemingly in high spirits.
“I know it’s easy to focus on the negatives — we’re not scoring goals, we’re not winning — but shoot, we ain’t losing either, and we ain’t conceding goals,” Hart said. “And if and when we figure out how to click and generate more goals, we’re going to win a lot of games.”
Alabama will look to start this offensive outburst in its next game, on the road against Mercer. The game will be played Sunday at 1 p.m. and will air on ESPN+.
