STARKVILLE, Mississippi - The Texas A&M Aggies held off the Mississippi State Bulldogs, 2-1, Thursday evening at MSU Soccer Field to close out the regular-season on a three-match win streak.With the victory, Texas A&M wrapped up the regular-season with a 10-7-1 overall mark and a 5-5-1 league ledger. The Aggies are tied with Tennessee and Vanderbilt for sixth place in the league standings, but the Maroon and White will be the No. 8 seed at next weeks SEC Tournament in Orange Beach, Alabama.Texas A&M drew first blood early in the contest. With just over 43 minutes showing on the first half clock, Ashlynn Harryman was taken down on the left side of the penalty box. Mississippi States goalkeeper Tanya de Souza stonewalled Haley Pounds on the penalty kick, but the rebound went right back to the feet of Pounds who sent the carom into the back of the net for the 1-0 lead.Mississippi States best chance to score in the opening half came on a three-shot flurry in the 24th minute by McKenna de Graaf. The first two shots were cleared off the goal line by Kendall Ritchie and Danielle Rice punched the final shot in sequence over the crossbar.The Aggies went into the intermission with a 1-0 lead. Texas A&M owned an 8-6 edge in shots in the first half. The Bulldogs put an equalizer on the scoreboard early in the second stanza. Taking a free kick at the center stripe, Ariana Holmes sent an offering into a meeting of the clans in the penalty box.After the ball ping-ponged near the penalty spot Mallory Eubanks used her right foot to thread a shot through four players, scoring inside the right post to tie the score at 1-1 in the 48th minute. Texas A&M reclaimed the lead 74 seconds later. With the ball at the top of the penalty box, Stephanie Malherbe delivered a pass to Grace Wright near the right corner of the box.Wright found an open alley to shoot and ripped a shot from 25 yards into the left upper 90 for her first career goal. The Aggies missed a chance to put an insurance goal in the books in the 61st minute when Grace Pipers header on a free offering from Wright hit the right post. McKayla Paulson and Pounds both had late scoring chances turned away by solid Mississippi State defense. Mississippi State owned the advantages in shots (19-12) and shots-on-goal (9-6), but Rice came up huge in goal with eight saves.The Aggies return to action Monday at 6:00 pm Central as they play the Alabama Crimson Tide in the opening round of the SEC Tournament.TEXAS A&M QUOTES Head Coach G Guerrieri On the match... Thats a gritty Mississippi State team who has really improved by leap and bounds in the last year, so it took 90 minutes of effort to win that match. Its great to end the regular-season on a three-match win streak and take some momentum to Orange Beach.On heading to the SEC Tournament... Were starting to get healthy and were putting some wins on the board, but Orange Beach is going to be a grind. If we want to win the tournament were going to have to play four tough games in a seven-day stretch. Its a tall task, but I think if any team can do it we can. Cheap Adidas Lightning Jerseys .Y. -- Sabres defenceman Tyler Myers had no intention of changing his hard-hitting style before taking part in a disciplinary hearing for his illegal check to New Jersey forward Dainius Zubrus head. Cheap Lightning Jerseys . Anthony Davis had 31 points and 17 rebounds in his seventh straight game with more than 20 points, but that was only enough to keep the Pelicans competitive into the final minutes. 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Words are no more permanent than clouds, forever appearing and disappearing, changing their shape and their meaning. Luxury was once the same thing as lechery but the two words have long since parted company. In sport, the term professional was once an insult, now its a compliment. Its a word that reflects changing times.To be a professional athlete was until 1984 to be barred from the Olympic Games. Rugby union didnt accept professional players until 1995. But these days just about every athlete in the world would be happy to be described as a good pro. Its amateur thats now an insult. It now means slipshod, with low standards and expectations.The ancient and negative use of the world professional was largely an English thing to begin with. So inevitably its about social class. Or to be more accurate, its about social differences heavily disguised as moral differences. If you accepted money for playing sport, you were considered less of a person than one who played for free. In other words, the upper-middle classes - who could afford to play sport without reward - were by definition more moral than the working classes, who would lose money by missing a shift.But cricket, though always acutely aware of social class, has always been able to include people of different social strata in the same team, and to pay some but not others. Thats because the game itself is modelled on the class system: hard-working bowlers delivering the ball to privileged batsmen, who get the benefit of any doubt.Cricketers were all in it together, except not quite. Professionals changed in different changing rooms, travelled separately to away games, and frequently stepped onto the ground through different gates. Until 1962 this social chasm was celebrated by the annual Gentlemen v Players match.It should be noted here that the notion of amateurism - of not being a professional - was set about with hypocrisy. Players with gentlemanly backgrounds were frequently paid for playing, but were called club secretary. Sometimes they accepted a sinecure from some local firm. WG Grace, who posed as the quintessential amateur, was a full-time phoney, accepting considerable amounts of money for playing while pretending that he did nothing of the kind.But increasingly professionalism was seen as a good thing - commitment, hard work and responsibility, as opposed to languid condescension. This reflected the social changes of the 1960s. In many sports, the term professional was used, at first a little defiantly annd then in a more straightforward fashion, to cover all sorts of worthy qualities.ddddddddddddThe word has come to imply a set of rather humdrum virtues, the minimum standards for playing top-level sport - proper preparation before seasons and matches, the ability to execute skill sets and to stick to prearranged plans. Its a term never used for performances of inspiration and flamboyance and style.A team is chasing a lowish total in a 50-over match. The players dont try and blast the lot in 20 overs. They work the bowling, collect the singles and win without risk in 45 overs - a thoroughly professional performance. Or a team without stars stifles a better team with tight, accurate bowling, crash-hot fielding and esprit de corps. That too is a professional performance. So to be professional is a compliment, but not an overwhelming one. This has spread to the off-field part of a cricketers life. To put a homophobic insult on your Twitter account is deemed unprofessional. Its professional to arrive on time, to wear the right clothes on match day, to give an interview in which you avoid questions with perfect politeness, to manage public appearances without using words that offend people, to avoid public drunkenness and early-morning spats outside nightclubs.A failure to do so is unprofessional not because its immoral but because it affects your earning power - and that can affect the earning power of your agent and your team-mates. Thus the England team that urinated on the pitch at The Oval after their Ashes win in 2013 was considered unprofessional. It was wrong because it made a newspaper story, not because it was in itself a bad thing. They should have known better. They should have known what newspapers are like. They should have been more professional.Once, to be professional was to be a second-class person. A professional couldnt play for certain clubs in certain sports. In other sports, professionals were banned outright. If you accepted payment for writing a book about rugby you couldnt play rugby again because you were forever tainted.Now rugby players boast about their professional standards. The same thing is true in many other sports, including cricket. Hes a good player, we say: very dedicated, very committed, very focused - very professional. A first-class type, in fact - well, first-class of the second class, anyway. Thats your pro. ' ' '