SU defense shaky down stretch, nearly blows 10-goal lead
Bridget Looney couldn’t have been more irritated with her team’s defense. The senior midfielder, along with the rest of the Syracuse offense, spent the first half contributing goals en route to building a double-digit lead against No. 8 Notre Dame.
All the Orange needed was another half of consistent defense to claim victory. And to Looney’s dismay, the SU defenders barely held down their end of the bargain.
‘We didn’t remain calm in situations,’ Looney said. ‘We let them control the game. We got frantic, played to their game, and didn’t play our game. We just have to work on our mental toughness.’
After boasting a ten-goal lead midway through the first half against the Fighting Irish, Syracuse uncharacteristically allowed its Big East foe to creep back into contention and trim the deficit to one.
Syracuse ultimately withstood Notre Dame’s rally, winning 14-13, but it wasn’t the ideal conclusion that SU head coach Gary Gait expected. The Fighting Irish ended the game on a 12-3 run. Still, Gait didn’t place the entire blame for the Orange’s meltdown on his defense.
‘They have a couple of the top scorers in the country on that team,’ Gait said referring to Notre Dame’s top scoring duo of Jillian Byers and Shaylyn Blaney. ‘We’re always going to continue to get better, but those are two of the best players in the country. They just did their job in the second half.’
Despite the bevy of second half scores, the Fighting Irish first exposed the Orange’s defensive weaknesses in the first half. Trailing by nine goals with two minutes left until halftime, Maggie Tamasitis induced SU goalkeeper Liz Hogan to leave her post and defend the backside of the goal.
Behind the net, Hogan fouled Tamasitis, setting up an opportunity for a free position. Off the restart, Tamasitis immediately fired a pass over the net to Byers, who scored a goal in the empty net before Hogan could scramble back into position.
‘Yes, I made many mistakes,’ Hogan said. ‘I definitely own up to that, but I think our defense lost composure.’
The defense’s mental lapse was relatively evident throughout the ordeal. A few minutes into the half, Notre Dame midfielder Kailene Abt single-handedly weaved through the SU defenders with juke moves and rifled an easy goal past Hogan.
The Fighting Irish ultimately strung together five goals in the first 10 minutes of the second half to jumpstart the rally.
After managing only 11 shots on goal in the first half, the Fighting Irish pummeled the Orange defense, firing 19 second-half shots, 10 of which landed in the back of the net. At one point after Notre Dame’s sixth goal of the half, Hogan slammed her stick on the dome turf out of anger.
‘We knew that Notre Dame was a great team,’ SU midfielder Christina Dove said. ‘It’s a long game, so we knew that they were going to come back eventually. They weren’t just going to roll over and let us beat them by that much. But we also knew that we had what it took to withstand it.’
For most of the second half, however, it didn’t look like the Orange defense would halt Notre Dame’s comeback bid. The Fighting Irish controlled most of the possessions on the opposing end, denying Syracuse’s prolific offense an opportunity to stop the bleeding.
With two minutes remaining, Katie Rowan added one last goal to provide the team with a three-goal cushion. But the defense almost squandered that advantage, allowing Notre Dame to score two goals 15 seconds apart.
In the end, Hogan blocked a potential game-tying goal by Blaney with 32 seconds left to preserve the game.
‘I think that we didn’t have composure and the communication was a little less than what we expected,’ Hogan said. ‘Overall, I thought we did a good job at coming back and pulling out what we needed to do. We had our struggles, but at the end of the day, we did what needed to be done.’
