Three days after outshooting Montana 19-7 over nearly a full 110 minutes, Ross Paule’s Bluejays peppered Drake’s back line from the opening touch on their way to a 2-0 win over their former conference rival on Sunday afternoon at Morrison Stadium. Creighton rode a first-half goal by Cristina Garriga and a second-half clincher by Abigail Santana to improve to 2-0-0 on the young 2021 season.
The Bluejays’ attack finished the match with a 22-8 edge in shots, while sophomore goalkeeper and team co-captain Keelan Terrell made two saves to secure the second clean sheet of her career.
After Hailey Rothwell’s header with 46.3 seconds remaining in the second overtime period helped the Jays escape with a 2-1 opening night win on Thursday, Paule felt his team made the game harder on themselves. While they still came up empty on some prime scoring opportunities against Drake, he did feel as if his team moved the needle in the right direction.
“We took a stride by a different challenge,” the seventh-year Creighton coach said, “I think the challenge today was to move the ball, find the space … I felt like we did leave a little bit on the field because we could have scored more goals. We want to be a team that doesn’t leave goals untaken.
“I think it’s a step forward because anytime you get two wins at home, and in a row, you gain confidence from that. It’s also good to walk away from a game that we felt like we didn’t play as well as we can and we still got a win. There are a lot of things we’ll look at on video and look to raise our standards on the certain things that we know do successfully if we do them a little bit better.”
The Bulldogs (0-1-1), who played Kansas to a scoreless draw on Thursday, kept numbers back defensively for much of the first half, but then Creighton pounced on costly miscue and broke through in the 22nd minute. Drake senior defender Megan Valenzuela started the sequence when she mishit a pass back to her senior goalkeeper Kelsie Stone. Creighton sophomore forward Renee Pountney made a run at the loose ball, but Stone slid in to deflect it away. Jays junior midfielder Cristina Garriga was the beneficiary of the rebound, however, and all it took was an easy boot from just inside 40 yards out to put it into the empty net, giving CU a 1-0 lead.
That score held into the break as the Bluejays piled up a 10-2 advantage in shots in the opening 45 minutes.
Second-year midfielder Abigail Santana pushed Creighton’s lead to 2-0 in the 52nd minute. The Jays flipped the field with a through ball to the right sideline. Then, freshman wingback Maddie Radke tracked it down and passed it ahead to Santana, who slipped by her defender, deked the charging Stone, and flicked it into the back of the net for her second goal of the young season.
“Ross has been telling me to make those runs behind the back line,” Santana said. “I saw Maddie get the ball, she created space, and my run was kind of towards the corner. I got a touch and it kind of fumbled on the defender, but I saw she didn’t clear it enough so I took a touch by the goalie and finished it left foot.”
Creighton will take Monday off to recover, then get back to work before taking their unbeaten show on the road with a Thursday night match against Tulsa and a Sunday afternoon meeting with Oral Roberts awaiting them.