There are few things in sport more gut-wrenching than a penalty kick shoot out. All the field players stand at the midfield line and the appointed penalty taker has a fifty-yard long walk up to the penalty spot. The weight of the world and the fate of your teammates can be completely overwhelming, but one team is going to be able to embrace the pressure of the moment, make the kicks, and seal the win. Florida State was that team.
Virginia        0 – 0 (0-3 PKs)          Florida State
It is a truism that soccer is a game of two halves, akin to saying that the ball is round (also the title of a stunningly great history of soccer.) And Virginia, playing against the best team in the country, won the first half.
Swanson rolled out the HoosPlace Preferred Lineup from the get-go, starting with Rebecca Jarrett on the left wing and Alexa Spaanstra on the right. And Jarrett, paired on that left with midfielder Lia Godfrey and defender Samar Guidry, destroyed the right side of FSU’s defense, and to be frank, embarrassed Seminole right back Kirsten Pavlisko who bit repeatedly at Jarrett’s feints to the center of the pitch.
For the fifth straight match, Swanson was able to run out with the same 11 starters – excepting the aforementioned Jarrett and Spaanstra switch – and Virginia’s spacing and composure on the ball in this game was markedly different from the ACC regular season matchup with Florida State. Guidry was able to dominate the left flank and that left Godfrey free, surprisingly to me, to take FSU’s Jaelin Howell out of the match. Emma Dawson continued her fine run of play by putting together her best half of the season.
But like the football team that is able to march up and down the field in the first half, and fail to score, and then suffers in the second half, Virginia had nothing to show for their best half of the season. Jarrett had a rocket in the game’s 12th minute that echoed the non-goal from TCU in the quarterfinals. Still no goal line camera, but more angles, and this didn’t look like it went in, either. But the chances were there and as Coach Swanson said before the game, you have to convert your chances. Florida State ain’t going to beat themselves.
So if Swanson won the first half’s tactical battle by switching Jarrett and Spaanstra, Florida State’s Mark Krikorian won the battle in the second half. Recognizing that Pavlisko needed help (Duh!) he basically shifted center back Emily Madril wide right and they doubled Jarrett out of the game. Krikorian also started Jody Brown and played her much of the half (she’s normally part of the second line) and Brown has the speed to catch Jarrett on the dribble.
The other factor working to Virginia’s detriment was that Guidry sat on the bench for the first 15 minutes. Guidry had picked up a bit of a knock in the first half, so I presume this was an injury scratch, given her prowess on the ball, but without her, and with Jarrett doubled, UVa’s attack down the left fizzled. And Godfrey tired pretty quickly in the second half which allowed Howell and Clara Robbins to take over the midfield for FSU. And the Seminoles came knocking. FSU, maybe more than any other team in women’s soccer, is able to possess the ball in the center of the pitch, just 10 yards outside of the box, and when you give Robbins and Yujie Zhao time on the ball, in that space, they’ll usually carve you up. And yet Virginia’s back line held firm and absorbed the pressure and Florida State was unable to make much of their second half dominance.
Florida State had six corners in the second half. Let’s just stipulate that FSU is scary good on corners – two of their four goals against us in the regular season came via corners – and that Virginia has had their own adventures defending corners over the years. Plus, Swanson seemed to give the role of defending Howell in the box to Alexa Spaanstra. Yikes! I would have thought Claire Constant or Lizzie Sieracki would draw that responsibility. The mismatch and subsequent goal-line mayhem seemed inevitable. And yet Virginia held firm. 15 of the 21 goals that Virginia has surrendered this year have come from penalties or set pieces, but it wouldn’t be this night.
The other factor contributing to Virginia’s success, even as FSU was dominating the second half, was that FSU wasn’t able to play Virginia off the ball. The Seminoles are a physically strong team, and let’s just say that Virginia is not. We were just outmuscled off the ball in Tallahassee, but not in this game. Swanson’s women share the same fate as Tony Bennett’s guys in that other teams have a free reign to foul harder than our guys, and this game was no exception. The foul totals were equal – 13 called on both teams, each team awarded a yellow card, and both sides thought they had a legitimate penalty denied – but Florida State was able to do a lot more damage for their fouls.
If soccer had judges like boxing does, Virginia might have won this game because we had the better run of play in overtime. Call the first OT a draw. But we were more aggressive in the second half, and to be frank, I think FSU was looking just not to concede a silly goal and they were confident going to PKs. First half and second OT: Virginia. Second half: Florida State. First OT was split. If we didn’t, you know, have to actually score goals, I could make the case that Virginia was the better team on the day.
But that’s not the law of the game. Ties after the two overtimes are decided by penalty shoot out. While penalty kicks are part of the game, there is something especially jarring about how static the shoot out is, especially in comparison to the constant motion of the game. I, for one, love PKs, and just about every World Cup game that goes into overtime is one where I am rooting for penalties. It is primal, and for the penalty takers, there is no where to hide and no one to help.
There is really only one rule for the shoot out. Keep the ball on the deck. Keep the ball on the deck. Keep the fricking ball on the deck! 50 yards is an insanely long approach to the ball and soccer players don’t get to practice this. Golfers do. If they hit a shot into the rough, well, they have to go find the ball. Golfers are always scrambling, they get used to long walks to approach their ball. But not soccer players. This walk is unlike anything else is sport. The thing about the yips is that you don’t know when they are going to hit. That’s why you keep the ball on the deck. Because it’s just too easy to sail the ball over the crossbar. Just ask Roberto Baggio.
Unfortunately, the yips got to Alexa Spaanstra on Virginia’s first try, and she sailed the ball over the crossbar. She broke the cardinal rule and she had to pay the cardinal price of having to walk back those 50 yards to her teammates who are trying to be brave and telling her it’s alright. Only she knew it wasn’t. The game was lost the instant Spaanstra missed the PK. Florida State, who had defeated Duke in the quarterfinals on PKs, gave a clinic on how to take penalties: low and into the side netting. Ordonez and Torres took penalties that were, well, they were crap: chest high, without power, and only about a 1/3 of the way from the side netting. They were stylistically the inverse of Kyle Guy sinking his three free throws versus Auburn. Losing via penalty kicks is simply a brutal way to lose and that trio of Cavaliers will remember those misses for years.
But I’m going to give the last word to Taryn Torres. This is just a game, after all, and these players persevered throughout a pandemic that has taken over 550,000 American lives. She has the right perspective.
“I love this team. I think that we’ve gone through so much. We bounced back from injuries, COVID, contact tracing. We’ve been able to come back and come together. We were resilient, and I’m just so proud of this team and I wouldn’t have it any other way … It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t have [played for the NCAA title], but it was super exciting, rewarding feeling to play at such a high level, on such a big stage.”
Brava, Taryn, brava.