Cavaliers Now

Virginia Women’s Soccer Falters at Home to Notre Dame 1-0

It was a tale of two halves.  Virginia lost the second, and ultimately the game.

Val Prochaska

Virginia Athletics

After a deluge on Saturday night postponed the Virginia v Notre Dame matchup to early Sunday afternoon, both the Cavaliers and the Fighting Irish came out of the tunnel twitching and full of energy.  The first half was one of the more entertaining halves you’ll see.  With Lia Godfrey finally ready to stamp her will on the game, Virginia head coach Steve Swanson reverted back to his preferred 4 – 3 – 3, and for the first time all season, the Hoos bossed the midfield to a degree we haven’t seen much of the past two seasons.

Alexis Theoret got seven touches in the game’s first five minutes while Ella Carter looked like the top 25 recruit that she was.  It was Carter’s best game of her collegiate career and her tidy play helped connect right back Laney Rouse and right wing Allie Ross, who not coincidentally had their brightest halves of the season.  Yuna McCormack has been away for a month with women’s national team at the U20 World Cup and Carter has made the most of her minutes.  I expect she’ll take a back seat to McCormack, but she should now be the first midfielder off the bench and she will be a force.

I’d been fretting that maybe Godfrey had lost a step – she has taken a very long time to round into form – but she showed that she had not.  She had solo dribbles of 30 and 50 yards showcasing the drive to goal that has made her a three-time All American.  Virginia would have 61% of the first-half possession based on the strong play of Theoret, Carter and Godfrey, which then allowed Tatum Galvin (starting in place of Samar Guidry) and Laney Rouse to have their most effective attacking games of the season.

For Notre Dame’s part, they bring a 13-person recruiting class to the pitch, featuring freshman Izzy Engle – who already has a trio of game-winners to accompany her 10-goal tally this season – and Annabelle Chukwu – a top 10 player in high school.  This is a young team, unafraid of the moment, and ready to make noise on the national stage. (Maybe the best stat of the year:  21 of Notre Dame’s 25 goals this season had been scored by freshman.)  While Virginia would outshoot the Irish 11-3 in the first half, Notre Dame’s were just better opportunities.  In a 30-second interval, Engle brilliantly dummied Kiki Maki to get a good shot while Chukwu got behind the defense and forced a great save from Viki Safradin.

The second half unraveled pretty quickly as just 40 seconds in Chukwu blew past Moira Kelley to collect a through ball.  Kelly caught up, but her exertion made it easy for Chukwu to turn on her and slot home the game’s only goal.

I presume the Notre Dame game plan was all along to come out and press Virginia higher, and that it wasn’t a tactical decision made after the goal, but press Notre Dame did, and Virginia just couldn’t cope.

The second half became a graphic illustration of the nexus whereupon Virginia finds herself; the historical weaknesses in the program vis a vis the concerns specific to this season.

The first long-standing issue is team speed, as in, the Cavaliers don’t have it.  There’s not anybody on this team who is slow, this is a perennial top 15 team after all, but there’s no one who can match up on the defensive end against the speed that Chukwu or Wake’s Caiya Hanks can bring to bear.  Take a look at Chukwu’s goal.  Virginia just doesn’t have anyone who can defend that kind of burst.

The second issue is that Steve Swanson teams are finesse, ball-control oriented teams.  These women can be bullied on the pitch.  Notre Dame was called for 12 fouls to Virginia’s five, three of which came in the last minute of the game as the Irish were taking the ball to the corner flag to run down the clock.  Refs just won’t stand for 20 to 4 foul disparities so they allow a lot of extra-curricular contact.  I mean, this wasn’t even one of the dozen fouls called on Notre Dame.

The third long term trend of the Cavs is that they are just horribly profligate in front of goal.  Against good competition, it usually takes about 16 shots for Virginia to capitalize.  And that has been a weakness of Virginia for about a decade, even with Makenzy Doniak, Meghan McCool, Diana Ordonez and Haley Hopkins as featured central strikers.  Current center forward Meredith McDermott gives it her all, but she’s just not of the class of the aforementioned quartet, with just one goal in the eight games she’s played this year.

This year’s team, though, adds to challenges by really struggling to bring the ball out of the back.  The Hoos looked much more comfortable in the first half – indeed, it was the best half of the year – but that collapsed when Notre Dame started pressing.  Compounding the challenge, keeper Viki Safradin, who looks like she’s going to be quite the keeper in her stint between the sticks for Virginia, is really poor with the ball at her feet.  More often than not, and even when only mildly pressured, she just puts the ball out of bounds.  Conversely, it looks like the high press is something Swanson has tried to add to Virginia’s arsenal.  Except that they're not very good at it.  Usually it’s just McDermott or Maya Carter expending a boatload of energy chasing the ball.

The book is out on how to beat Virginia: press high, and when (if?) Virginia gets into the middle third, get back quickly in the low block, flooding the box with numbers.  Rough ‘em up a bit and look to play medium balls behind the back line.

Virginia is now 1-2 in the ACC, scoreless in the last two games.  The women are sitting 12th in a 17-team ACC where only six teams advance to the ACC tournament.  Their next two games are away to UNC and away to Duke.  To borrow a football metaphor, the women are in four-down territory.  A pair of losses will effectively end this season while a pair of draws won’t move the needle.  The women need wins.  They have some time; the UNC game is next Friday and the Duke game is the following Thursday.  With Godfrey growing game by game and Yuna McCormack back in the fold, Virginia can still make some noise of their own.  But it’s all uphill from here.

Published
Val Prochaska

VAL PROCHASKA

Val graduated from the University of Virginia in the last millennium, back when writing one's senior thesis by hand was still a thing. He is a lifelong fan of the ACC, having chosen the Tobacco Road conference ahead of the Big East. Again, when that was still a thing. Val has covered Virginia men's basketball for seven years, first with HoosPlace and then with StreakingTheLawn, before joining us here at Virginia Cavaliers on SI in August of 2023, continuing to cover UVA men's basketball and also writing about women's soccer and women's basketball.