ACC Championship Goal

Byline Service Rears Its Head; 

UVA Heartbroken In ACC Final

Calle Brown, the 6' 5" GK for the University of Virginia, played small with 90 seconds to play in the ACC final against University of Maryland, and paid a steep price.  The trouble with the details that prove so often to be a team's downfall is that they require great attention, often being downright counter-intuitive actions.  It's not enough to simply intellectually understand the detail...that minute point has to be so thoroughly trained that it's a thought-less action, an instinct.  In the pressure of the moment, it would appear Brown suffered some degree of paralysis by analysis and got himself stuck in an untenable situation.  That the play resulted in an own-goal only makes the breakdown that much harder to watch:

Now look at the stills below to see a stark contrast in the way Brown played here versus other, more effective styles (highlighted on 192 Square Feet in past posts - here, here, and here):

OK, so far, so good for UVA.  But any good attacker should know that byline service is a wonderful plan B to shooting on goal.  Mullins' comments to the media after the game show both an intuitive grasp of the advantage, but clearly not a full understanding:

“I have seen it happen so many times,” said Mullins, the tournament MVP. “If you put the ball in good spots and play it in there with some pace, good things happen.”

Washington Post 

That's a bit reductive, perhaps because he doesn't realize what the GK has to do when he takes the ball to the byline.  As it happened, Mullins did exactly the right thing, though Brown has to be singled out for having made the right choice pretty obvious, and letting the best player in the nation play without pressure inside the 6 yard area:

With one good option left to him, Mullins takes what Brown gives him.  Brown could have positioned himself better and taken away the one option, but he froze, played small both figuratively, and physically, and Mullins banked a hard cross off the defender on the very right edge of the screen grab for the goal.  Perhaps unlucky for UVA, but certainly the GK did not do all that is possible in this situation.