UVA-Maryland Lax championship post

A couple thoughts on the UVA-Maryland final for Memorial Day.

For the second straight year, a great match-up between teams that didn't have the best seasons and maybe owe thier path to some fluky results elsewhere, but also two teams that seemed like they arrived in the playoffs the most ready, a fact that rarely becomes obvious prior to the second or third game of the tourney.

UNC, for instance, lost by a single goal in the ACC tourney - no shame in that, it turns out - and then beat Notre Dame at home to finish the year. They looked ready.

They weren't. Maryland came to town and pushed them around and out hustled them and frustrated them and made them look bad on their own field. Not shocking - UNC hasn't played well in the post season in, well, 20 years actually, and Maryland - fresh off outright winning the ACC tournament and getting the lowest seed of the four ACC teams for their trouble - surely had something to prove in Chapel Hill. So perhaps what Maryland did to UNC - blow them away - was one of those fluky things.

But then Maryland did it to Syracuse, too. They fought, pushed, shot and D'd-up with the best team in the country all the way to overtime. Then with none of the nerves or rushing so common in OT (its the flaw of 'sudden death': when one shot wins the game, too many teams rush into silly, low-percentage shots hoping to get lucky), Maryland took their time, waited for Cuse to sieze up and ended it with a wide-open, leave-no-doubt shot from their best player 10 yards out.

What had looked like confusion and laziness on the part of UNC was now obviously (or at least partly) something different: Maryland is bigger but slower than most teams - hell, their goalie and one of thier starting attackmen are fat - but they had dictated a slower, meaner pace in both games to suit them.

Once you realized that, it was pretty clear Maryland was your Hot team heading into the semi - the ACC championship, blitzing UNC, then knocking off The Cuse. That's the team you get out of the way of if you can.

But surely the defending national champs and perenial ACC bully, Duke, would stand ready for whatever strange mojo Maryland had ginned up?

Only, this wasn't the defending national champs, nor much of a bully - they start a freshman on attack, half the line-up is gone from last year and they came into the tournament with 5 losses. Duke was, as they always are, skilled and smart but, oddly, not quite in Final Four gear when they slammed head first into Maryland, or rather, when Maryland slammed head, fists, shoulders and knees-first into them. Within 5 minutes of the whistle, Maryland had decked three different Duke players in loose ball fights - just boom-MFer, head-snappers, which NEVER truly happen in big time lacrosse - and soon enough was up an angry, heavy 3-1 that turned out to be fatal. Duke didn't quit and tried to return fire, both with skill and some tenacious scrapping, but Maryland did the hardest thing to do in any sport: they played angry for a whole game. Well, really, they played angry for 3 and half quarters, putting a solid half dozen more Dukies down in the process with hits that became less 'hard play' and more 'head hunting' as the game went on, and somewhere in the fourth, Duke had had enough and stopped hitting back.

They balled to the end - Duke always does, the bastards - but even if you pull your goalie out as a way to say you're not quitting, not winning any groundballs down the stretch or having 3 goals total with 5 minutes to play says a lot more.

How have they done it? Well, their face-off guy, curtis Holmes, is winning over 60 percent, which essentialy guarantees that Maryland has the ball more than its opponent, wearing down defensive legs and frustrating the idle offense, which in turn leads to pressing and bad decisions when Maryland is back on D.
Also, as noted, they have a fat goalie! Nothing more fun in major-college sports than a big fat guy in there. In swoop the genetic freaks and curly-haired popular kids with their perfect skills and showy dives and jumps, and up steps the tubby kid - a lifetime of snacks in front of the TV stuffed behind his pads - to turn them away. Nothing more American for Memorial day than a fat goalie!

Maryland is here because they know how to ride a nasty streak. Whether or not 'I'll just call you Ms. Jackson' is a gameplan for a championship is to be seen.

It wasn't, in fact, already once this weekend, in whole different sport on a whole different level, but not entirely unrelated: just prior to Maryland-Duke, European soccer's Champions League held its Super Bowl/Olympics/St. Patrick's Day event, the Champions League final, which saw English champs Manchester United roar onto the field against Barcelona - roughly, the Syracuse of soccer, only with both Gait brothers rolled up into 5'6" forward Lionel Messi - and tried to push around the smaller, better Spanish team and, after about 12 minutes of annoyance, Barca found its range and remorselessly punished the English for the rest of the game by just out-awesoming them in every technical and athletic way possible. Nasty, meet Nastier.

That game, as it happens, took place at exactly the same time as Virginia dismantled Denver in the other lacrosse semifinal, and when they meet Maryland today, it will be UVA who, like Barcelona, is viewed as the side with talent, pedigree and presumption of victory.

Virginia has, among other things, Steele Stanwick, who with that name and a UVA degree you have to assume is going to be a banker and not your banker, of course but, like, Exxon's banker, but is for now the best offensive player in the country. He has, through the first 3 rounds of the playoffs, 20 points, an obscene total. Against Denver in the national semifinals, UVA rung up 14 goals, including a Game-Over 9-2 halftime lead. Eight players scored for UVA. This isn't a team so much as a weather system.

And yet Virginia, with its Brahman recruiting bloodlines and relentless offense, is a team that perhaps even more than Maryland, has a dark and flawed tale to tell.

A year ago, UVA was in thier accustomed spot as #1 or #1A (to a the peerless Syracuse) in the country when one of their key midfielders, well, what he did was, well - deeeeep breath - he got drunk and, repeating previous episodes only with more fury this time, he went to see his ex-gf who also played lacrosse for UVA's women's team and apparently was just ridiculously likable and he beat this girl to death with his fists and left her lying in her bedroom. And then he went to jail where he sits today.

Less than 2 weeks after the world ended for pretty much anyone associated with UVA's teams, UVA lost to title-bound Duke by all of one goal. I imagine its safe to assume the UVA players probably felt like that game was one of the many things - and probably the least important - that the team murder had cost them.

Fast Forward to a month ago when, after still another year of just kicking all kinds of ass, shocking news erupts at UVA lacrosse: the team's best player and his pretty-damn-good-too identical twin brother have been dropped from the team for, well, nobody says what for but basicly the message got sent that they were assholes and everyone was sick of them. So now its playoff time and their best player and thier - lets just say - 5th best player and gone.
And then it happens again. After their first game, UVA announced they'd thrown still another starter off the team for, well, what kinda seems like assholery.

Lacking three major holes in the armor, what happened next was exactly what you would expect to happen: UVA went out and crushed everybody, and rolled into the final as the clear favorite

No?

Well, maybe its what you expect if you read the story not as a team in a crisis but as a team solving one on the shoulders of another. As an exercise in inner dialogue, it might go something like this: "last year was like drowning, but we learned that you have to look out for each other and that life is more than lacrosse, so Mr. All-American and your twin brother who have been a team cancer for 3.8 years, you can get the hell out and we'll be better for it. You too, wise ass. We'd rather lose without all of you than win with any of you, cuz the worst day we have on a field this year is gonna be better than the best day we had at school last year. see ya."

if it went down something like that, then UVA should arrive with focus to match their enormous skill.

So who ya got, Team Redemption or Team Nasty? Or, if you prefer, you can take your pick in a more whimsical spirit: Team Matt White (UVA starting attackman) or Team Fat Goalie!

(also, should Maryland win, they'll have beaten all three of thier ACC brethern in the playoffs)

Either way, should be a hell of a game.