CARY -- In the first half of yesterdays quarterfinal nightcap at the women's soccer ACC Tournament, fourth-seeded Duke was mild. The Blue Devils had a corner kick land too far from the goal, a head-on free kick straight to the goalie and a couple of balls bouncing around with nothing but defenders from No. 5 seed Virginia circling them, a 1-0 lead in the Cavaliers hands.
"I thought we got really tentative in the first half, and it just wasn't Duke soccer," head coach Robbie Church said. "But we got out of the half only down one, and we've been in that situation many times this year, and we've been able to come back from it. At halftime we talked about just [how] we had to go out and attack, we had to be aggressive, we had to keep going forward."
Church reminded his players that, at this rate, they had only one half of guaranteed soccer left in their season, so the Blue Devils went from mild to extra hot in the second half. They scored two goals within arms length of Virginia goalkeeper Anne Abernethy to move on with a 2-1 victory and face top-ranked and first-seeded North Carolina Friday night.
Less than four minutes into the second stanza, sophomore Carolyn Riggs sent a sweeping cross through traffic in the box. Rebecca Moros held off a UVa defender to give freshman Darby Kroyer the right of way, and Kroyer booted the ball high and hard to tie the game, 1-1.
"I just tried to stick my foot in there to get contact on the ball, and it just went in," said Kroyer, who scored for the second straight contest. "It was pretty cool."
Duke kept the ball in enemy territory for almost all of the next 20 minutes, winning balls in the midfield and getting the kind of legitimate scoring chances that have been hard to come by in ACC play this season.
Riggs strode free on a breakaway less than five minutes after Kroyer's goal and put a quick move as she went one-on-one with Abernethy, only to have it stuffed out of bounds. Then, in the 61st minute, senior Gwendolyn Oxenham failed to control a header that went high and back towards midfield. Kroyer set up Riggs off a corner kick soon thereafter, only to have Riggs' header scoot just past the upper-left corner of the net.
But in the 67th minute, Carolyn Ford sent in a corner kick that Abernethy punched away toward Moros, who sent the ball into a small crease just to the right of the goal. Oxenham leapt up out of traffic to head home the game-winner, and the Blue Devils erupted in celebration.
"We went forward so much better in the second half than we did in the first half. I think that was why we created much more scoring opportunities," Church said. "In the first half, we got very tentative and we played a lot of balls backwards. And we've got some players who can score goals, and we've got some players that can go forward."
But Virginia moved forward into Duke territory immediately following the goal, as Lindsay Gusick, who had scored UVa's first-half goal on a hard shot past a diving Thora Helgadottir, had a breakaway after the kickoff. She couldn't control the ball well once Helgadottir jumped out to meet her, though, and Gusick wobbled a ball high into the jumping goalies hands.
The Cavaliers would control possession for much of the rest of the match, but mostly at a frantic pace. Wahoo midfielder Sarah Huffman had Virginia's best scoring opportunity of the half when she blasted a ball from 10 feet outside the box that had Helgadottir beat high to her left. But the ball sailed just wide, and Duke was on its way to face the mighty Tar Heels in the tournament semifinals--a scary thought, but one distant enough for now.
"There's just so much emotion in coming back from down 1-0 that we're all right now still thinking about this," Riggs said. "And I think we're allowed to kind of glow in our victory for a few hours before we move on to Carolina."
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