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Every week this season, Drake Porter has typed up three points for his defenders to focus on ahead of the upcoming game. It’s an idea he’s put to use this season because so many of the previous small locker room conversations no longer take place due to the pandemic — it’s a way to have the conversation digitally, he said.

Grant Murphy highlighted one of Porter’s notes two weeks ago, which was about Vermont’s “delayed alley dodge” and how the Catamounts try to get underneath and re-dodge from a low angle, a “key feature to recall and focus on.” Another from Stony Brook last week was about preventing attacks from getting to the middle, Murphy said.

This week, Porter said his text message to the defender group referenced inverts, big-littles and transition defense. And after Syracuse conceded a season-low six goals against Holy Cross on Saturday afternoon in the Carrier Dome, Porter said postgame that “we hit all those really well.”

Against the Crusaders, Syracuse’s (4-1, 1-0 Atlantic Coast) third straight game against an unranked opponent ended with a straightforward victory. And while SU’s offense sputtered in a slow start that featured a one-goal first quarter, the defense didn’t concede a goal for the opening 35 minutes. Four of the Crusaders’ six goals came in garbage time after the Orange pulled their starters and put in their subs late in the third quarter, and Holy Cross (1-3, 0-2 Patriot League) finished with more turnovers (24) than registered shots (20).

“We knew we had the upper hand athletically, and then we worked all week. We knew they were going to invert us and hit us with big-littles, so that was something we really put an emphasis on,” Porter said postgame. “We executed really well today, worked on everything we practiced all week, so great performance from the defense”

When the Crusaders inverted by sending midfielders at the X, Syracuse was ready. The defenders applied sufficient pressure, shadowing Holy Cross’ players movements and closing down shooting lanes. They did it “literally every possession,” Porter said, and it was something Syracuse previously struggled with.

On one first-quarter play, short-stick defensive midfielder Peter Dearth jogged with Will Spangenberg as he trickled from the X toward the face of the goal. The Holy Cross attack couldn’t create more than a foot of separation despite the big-little matchup, though, and created nothing.

“We’re getting the ideas for what other offenses do, and a big part of that has been facing big-littles and inverts, which we struggled with early,” Porter said. “Defensively, to kind of stand tall there and go against something that we’d struggled with, it was good.”

The offense struggled early on, but the defense anchored SU and kept them in a must-win game. The offense was “riding off of their momentum,” Chase Scanlan said, and that helped get the attacks rolling.

In the first half, Holy Cross showed patience when it did have the ball, something head coach John Desko emphasized wasn’t a frequent occurrence because of SU’s 15-of-24 faceoff victories and 14 caused turnovers. They moved the ball smoothly around SU’s cage but couldn’t penetrate within 10 feet on numerous occasions.

The Crusaders weren’t favored in many one-on-one matchups against Murphy, Mitch Wykoff, Nick DiPietro and Brett Kennedy, so they struggled. Holy Cross finished with as many shots on goal as Scanlan had individually (11). The Crusaders tried to pick out a pass toward the cage at the start of the second quarter after searching for a way past SU’s defense, but the shot clock expired before they could register a shot. Holy Cross fired weak efforts that were straight at Porter for much of the first 30 minutes, and the SU goalie stood tall, so much so that ACC Network analyst Paul Carcaterra joked that they should check Porter for a pulse because of how calm he was.

When Holy Cross finally found its way through SU’s defense, it was via a scrappy goal five minutes into the third quarter. Cameron Magalotti scooped up a loose ball near Syracuse’s crease, though Wykoff and Brandon Aviles were both scrambling to try and recover it in the middle of a scrum. Neither did, and Magalotti bounced off contact before firing into the back of the net as he lost his balance. The goal was fitting for Holy Cross’ afternoon in the Carrier Dome, one where it struggled to produce many legitimate scoring chances against defensive coordinator Lelan Rogers’ team.

Desko credited Rogers’ with matching up SU’s personnel, which he said resulted in good individual defense. Holy Cross didn’t run many pick plays, instead trying to win one-on-one battles with the Orange. For the most part, it couldn’t.

“I think our defense just settled down into who they were,” Desko said. “We played good individual defense, (and) I thought that when we had to slide, we did.”

Published on March 20, 2021 at 5:13 pm

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