The NCAA College Cup Soccer Championships were held in Chester, PA this year at PPL Park (the home of MLS’s Philadelphia Union). Two semi final games were held on Friday, December 13th, a frigid day where the high temperature was only in the low 30’s. In the first match, Notre Dame squared off against New Mexico. The Fighting Irish got on the board early, scoring a goal in the 6th minute (Patrick Hodan) to take a 1-0 lead. Hodan, who had now scored in 6 straight games, scored again in the 64th minute and The Irish earned their first trip to the College Cup final by defeating the Lobos 2-0 in a hard fought game.
“I think our whole backline, the four guys in front of me and then Nick Besler, we all get confidence from getting a shutout. We’re all looking forward to the next game. We didn’t set out to get to the final; we set out to win the whole game.” said Notre Dame Senior Goalkeeper, Patrick Wall.
The second Friday match saw Virginia square off against Maryland. Maryland went into the intermission with a 1-0 (on a goal by Senior Forward Patrick Mullins) lead but Virginia converted on a second half penalty kick (Todd Wharton) to knot the score at 1-1. The Terrapins, ever resilient, got a second goal from Mullins to pull ahead and eventually win by a 2-1 score. Mullins leads the NCAA with 18 goals on the season and it’s no surprise that the Terps are 32-1-5 during his career in games where he scores.
After the game, Mullins was quick to credit his teammates with the great assists on both goals: “Both brilliant balls. Great vision from both [Mikias Eticha] and Tsubasa [Endoh] on the goals. As a forward, all you can do is make hard runs and hope the ball gets there. When you have great players feeding you the ball, more times than not, they’re going to get there. I got two great services, and I made sure to put them away.”
After a day of rest on Saturday (thankfully because an ice and snow storm moved through the area), the action resumed on Sunday, December 15th in the Championship game.
Mullins again found the back on the net for Maryland, putting the Terps up 1-0 in the 34th minute of action. The Irish’s Leon Brown tied things up at 1-1 less than five minutes later and the two teams went into half time tied 1-1. After a long season, the College Cup would come down to 30 minutes of action. In the 59th minute, Andrew O’Malley headed a ball from Harrison Shipp to put Notre Dame up 2-1. They would hang on to win the match, and the Championship, by the same score.
Speaking after the game (and his first NCAA title), Notre Dame Head Coach Bobby Clark had this to say: “Obviously, I think we’re all smiling big smiles. We’re very happy with the result. I thought it was a very hard-fought game. Any team coached by [Maryland head coach] Sasho Cirovski is going to be up for the fight. It wasn’t the prettiest game; I think it’s hard to play two games of that intensity in a period of two or three days, but I thought both teams put in a good shift. I know our guys worked terribly hard; I think the last 10 minutes, we were certainly working very hard. When we lost our big striker [Vince Cicciarelli] with a broken collarbone, that was a blow, but Leon Brown came in and got the equalizing goal. We went behind, and that was definitely a blow, but we equalized fairly quickly, and that was Leon that did that. Andrew O’Malley stuck that goal away…he missed a few all season, I can tell you, but he saved that goal for the right time. It was a great goal. it would have been nice, we’d had a couple of chance to make it 3-1 just after that, but we somehow scorned these and I think they just tried to add to my gray hairs. All in all, it was a great win for us against a very good team, and it finishes off the season very nicely for us.”
[Article by David Miller & Photo credit: Christian Hafer]
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