The #3 Notre Dame Fighting Irish mens’ lacrosse (6-2, 2-2 ACC) visit the #4 North Carolina Tar Heels (9-2, 2-2 ACC) for the Irish’s fourth straight game against a top-5 opponent.  Faceoff is at 2:00 pm  Sunday, ACC Network.

We also have a few notes on the boys’ overtime loss to Duke (12-1, 4-1 ACC), 12-13.  As our 18 Stripes lacrosse OG PunterBro noted in our internal chat, we have to file this game under “Lost Opportunities.”   Just a few words on it and we’ll move on.

Tar Heels Up Next

Notre Dame’s road doesn’t get any easier on Sunday with a visit to #4 North Carolina. The Irish will need to clean up their clears quickly as they should expect a heavy diet of full-field pressure from a team set up to effectively do it.  UNC also likes pushing offense earlier in their possessions, which will require a lot of defensive discipline. In their most recent game, they smashed Syracuse in a manner very similar to what Notre Dame did to them.

Their team scores an awful lot of goals, let by Chris Gray and Atlanta’s Nicky Solomon.  They have 10 guys with at least 20 points.  On the defensive end, we like Will Bowen a lot, and freshman Colin Krieg has been good in goal.

Irish will have opportunities to score, too, so we can probably expect a bit more back-and-forth action than we are accustomed to.

Focus Items

We’ll be looking at a few things to measure how the Irish are doing in this game:

  1. Fatigue:  The Irish have played on short rest once this season (Cleveland State), but playing a top-5 UNC is a whole different thing.  The good news is that the smaller schedule hasn’t put a lot of miles on this team and the coaching staff managed workload well versus Duke.  Still, it’s a lot to ask of a team and something to monitor.
  2. Face-offs:  The North Carolina unit is good, but in-conference they’ve only managed 40%.  The Irish need to find a few extra possessions at the dot as they will be hard to earn elsewhere.
  3. Man-up: This unit has been excellent for the Irish (62%), and the Tar Heels have been penalized quite a bit more than their opponents.  The Irish will need to be very effective with their opportunities.
  4. UNC Ride and Defense: The Tar Heels present a different kind of challenge for the Irish.  A lot more pressure throughout the filed, and defensemen like Will Bowen and Matt Wright are more of a disruptive style than the Irish have recently seen.  Quickly adjusting to this will be key.
  5. Scoring generally:  This game is very unlikely to be a slog.  Irish will have probably have periods in the game where they just have to beat UNC at their own style and score at pace.

The games at UNC have been very close this decade, and high scoring as compared to typical Irish games.  We’re looking forward to seeing what this Notre Dame squad can do against them!

#Cleatgate

We had a lot to say about this game, particularly on how it ended, but like the team, we need to move forward and will scale back our recap of the difficult loss to Duke on Thursday night.

The Scoring

As far as we are concerned, Pat Kavanagh had a great day on offense with 5* goals and 3 assists (*we know the scorecard says 4, but we give him credit even if the referees did not).  Dobson and Yorke added 2 goals each, while McCahon had 2 assists.

The second midfield line continues its great productivity with Mirer and Leahey scoring a goal each, and Lipka with a goal and an assist.

Reilly Gray had his first goal for the Irish at a critical point in the 4th quarter.

Liam Entenmann look great with 14 saves, with Gallagher taking the bulk of the faceoffs going 12 of 24.

As a team, the Irish had 17 turnovers, with 11 being in the second half.  They were otherwise disciplined, committing no penalties in regulation.

Shots were basically even, 40-41, as were all the other metrics such as possessions, time of possession, efficiency, etc.

The Irish were 15 of 21 clearing, mostly the result of the only cringy stat on the page, the 2 of 6 in the 4th quarter.

The Lost Opportunities

We went through the grieving process and wrote out an entire post mortem for our normal Plot recap, from the fantastic first 7/8ths of the game, to the final 7 minutes. However, we decided to cut it from this article after sleeping on it a few days.  If our readers are interested in it, leave us a comment below and we’ll consider posting later on.

These things happen, and momentum is a crazy thing, but the boys will evaluate and see they had a lot of opportunities to end the game before the Kavanagh clete goal.  They’ll learn from this and recognize the big picture, that they were the better team, but playing on the road requires more focus.  Again, these things happen. We move on to the next game.

Our Pregame Notes

To close off our recap of the Duke game, we’ll take a look at our pregame notes:

  • Faceoffs:  It was improved, with it being largely a draw at X  Losing the OT draw was a bummer, but Gallagher won the #cleatgate one while advancing forward to give the Irish a fair chance to win in regulation.
  • Defensive strength: Irish D dominated Duke for 7.5 quarters, and even the problems at the end weren’t because of poor defense.  The boys made more than enough stops to win.
  • Travel: The Irish came out strong and fresh.  No problems here, but we still have to wait on the UNC game to properly assess.
  • Duke’s defensive focus:  We figured Duke may switch it up and force the Irish to initiate through Kavanagh.  Big mistake on Duke’s part.  In the second half they switched back and had JTGH pretty much faceguard Kavanagh.  The Irish midfield did a great job of picking up the slack like they did in the first game.  We have every confidence they could have scored the necessary extra goal or two if the late clears had been tidier and they had the possessions to work with.
  • Field conditions: Poor field conditions impacted the game for sure.  This may be sour grapes, but there were possessions lost over slipping on that cow pasture. One less slip and that game doesn’t go to overtime.
  • Duke in the middle of the field: Credit to Duke, with 8 minutes left they found a way to play differently in the middle of the field.  It’s not a core strength for them, but they strung together enough strong rides to come back and win.
  • Duke Discipline: Duke didn’t change their plan much and late in the game just executed their plan better than they had been doing.  The only really noticeable change was Sowers dodging much higher on the wing, and later dodging from midfield, but they were using the same picks to give him space.
  • Notre Dame Depth:  The Irish managed their roster well.  The second midfield got a lot of time and was effective, and they played Parlette, Gray, Drake and Barger.  We haven’t heard anything officially, but we are concerned at seeing Boyer hobbling late in the game.

 

#GoIrish