They did, in the 2nd round of sudden death (so the 7th penalty for each team). Generally really well hit penalties; the 5th UVA penalty (to send it into sudden death) was my pick of the lot... and it needed to be, because the GTown keeper got a great jump with a correct guess. Replay should be up for the next week on ESPN's streaming service. Great game. Exactly what you want from a championship. Now it's time to wait and see who gets the GA offers and if there are any other surprises in terms of departures. The spring slate can't get here soon enough!
Congrats to Georgetown. They played the best soccer in the NCAA Tournament and, as such, deserved to win it all. Great season by the Cavs. Nothing to be ashamed of.
Box score of a very even final: http://www.guhoyas.com/sports/mens-soccer/stats/2019/virginia/boxscore/14823 Don't like to see a standout match decided by shootout but such is life and Gtown had the best year in program history.
Shootouts are - in fact - THE worst... but they are the rules that exist at the moment and until FIFA comes to their collective senses and asks me to replace Infantino and I enact my plan to do AET with diminishing numbers of players playing comes to fruition, they will remain so. Doesn't diminish the fact that this was a GREAT game.
It was an excellent and entertaining championship game. Two strong teams, battling hard, as one would expect--and some high-quality soccer. Georgetown looked to have it won with a goal at the 81' mark or so but Uva scored late to tie, and then on to OT and PKs--13 straight made until the save by the Georgetown keeper won it for the Hoyas.
The first year I coached kids the County Cup OT rule was no keepers. The OT games ended rather quickly.
How do you know it was a guess? Why is this always the common theme when it comes to penalties? Not everything is a guess. Sorry...pet peeve of mine.
Agreed. There is much nuance in the mano y mano struggle that is a PK. Converting a PK is a skill all too frequently dismissed as mere luck. GK preventing PK conversion is likewise an underrated skill. I hate matches decided by PKs just as much as the next guy. But. “It is the way!” Don’t go changing it now, not after so many tears have been shed. It is my opinion that PKs should be converted at a much higher rate globally. Whatever that number is, it should be higher. Each player will have already executed more difficult tasks within the very same match. All Zen. All between the ears. Yesterday’s Final was a very good match, and it was also a good PK shootout. The mistake was the statistical outlier. As it should have been. Congratulations Hoyas!
Keepers are taught to look for indications in the shooter's approach to which way he will shoot. Shooters are taught to fake those indicators. It's a guess. Other notes -- there was only one shot right down the middle, and no one missed the goal completely.
Is this an excuse to link to a compilation of Julian Dicks smashing penalties for West Ham? (I never need such an excuse. All hail the Terminator.) Re "guess" terminology: As a keeper, if you make your move proactively (as opposed to waiting until the ball is kicked and trying to reflex-dive the proper direction), you are guessing. It can be an informed guess, based on tendency data or looking for specific techniques or whatever uber-technology that the Stanford keeper has to make all those saves, but you are still making a guess.
I watched the video of the shootout and pulled out some stats -- 14 shooters, 13 right-footed, 1 left-footed (who shot to his right) 5 shots to the left, 8 to the right, 1 down the middle Keepers went left 7 times, right 7 times Keepers went the same way as the shot 6 times Final shot and save was to the shooter's left
Somewhere (and I don't know how to search for it) there is a video of a PK shot that hit the crossbar and bounced high. While the keeper is celebrating the miss, the ball came down and spun into the goal.
Congratulations to Georgetown on their first national title. After two decades with only two private school champions (SJU '96, WFU '07), the 2010's had five (Stanford x3, Notre Dame, Georgetown).
For whatever it's worth, you can listen to Georgetown GK Tomas Romero describe his thought process on the deciding PK in this interview courtesy of the Big East Digital Network's John Fanta: Georgetown took any and every punch from Virginia in the 110-minute, 7-round penalty kick national championship game. The Hoyas simply refused to be denied. My perspective + player reactions from @GUHoyasMSoccer's first national title in program history: pic.twitter.com/FfK88tVD40— John Fanta (@John_Fanta) December 16, 2019 "On that final PK, actually, I kinda had, like, a counter-intuitive thought. Usually, when the player goes back like that - like, the run-up that he has - you would expect him to go to my left. And for some reason, I just thought: "I think he's gonna go right. And he did. So..."