Notre Dame picks up seventh straight victory
HAMILTON >> The new coach and his new team are starting to get pretty familiar to each other, in a really good way.
Showing a relentless attack, the red-hot Notre Dame High boys’ soccer team rolled to a 5-0 victory at Nottingham Thursday, giving the Irish their seventh straight victory.
ND (12-2) has won 10 of 11 after a 2-1 start, as the Irish players continue to mesh with first-year coach Dan Donigan.
“The team loves him,” sophomore defender James Watson said. “Our chemistry is really good. We’re starting to sort it out in the back. We’re getting a couple guys back from injury, (Aiden) Hoenisch became eligible after transferring (from Bordentown).”
Hoenisch was one of five different goal scorers for the Irish, who held a 15-4 advantage in shots on goal. Chris O’Neill opened the scoring with his eighth goal of the season in the sixth minute, and six minutes later Hoenisch converted from O’Neill. Notre Dame continued to attack but Pat Luckie, whose 10 saves gives him the Northstar career record of 546, was able to keep it 2-0 until halftime.
The Irish kept their momentum after the break as Danny Bensch and Guiliano Silva tallied in the first 10 minutes of the second half, and James Ferraro capped the scoring late in the match.
Donigan felt it was a good win despite the fact Nottingham is struggling at 3-6-2.
“It doesn’t matter where either one of us are in the conference standings or anything like that,” he said. “We want to continue to play good soccer, we want to continue to feel good about where we’re at in this point of the season. It was important for us to come out and just play a good game. If we play a good game and play the way we’re capable of, we know we should come out and give ourselves a chance to get a good result.
“Nottingham is a very dangerous team. They have good pace to the attack. They’ve got a good goalkeeper and we just kept coming at them. That’s what we do to teams, we try to keep coming at them and don’t let the foot off the gas.”
Which is part of the reason why Notre Dame has recorded three straight shutouts, five in its last six games and eight on the season. The other reason has been a back line that has gradually been meshing.
Eric Suschke, Matt Jakim, Pedro Navroski and Watson are the starting back four in front of goalie Nick Wilke, while Brett Harris is the holding midfielder and John Caccavale rotates in.
“At the beginning of the season we were shaky, we gave up too many goals,” said Watson, who considers five goals in 14 games too many. “The last few games we kind of got in a rhythm, we know what we want to do and we execute.
“Today we knew we weren’t going to be able to possess the ball a lot on this grass, it’s not ideal. But we did what we needed to do. We got the ball up to our forwards. We have really good forwards, so it’s always easy when that happens. In the back we just try to communicate and do our job.”
And as Donigan noted, getting the ball into the attacking zone is all part of defending.
“It takes the 10 guys in front of Wilke to do a good defensive job,” the coach said. “When we’re pressing teams and we’re in the attack, we’re doing a good job defensively because we’re in the attack. That’s the way we look at it. Shutouts are very important to our team as whole, not just our back line.”
Notre Dame (12-2) 2 3 — 5 Nottingham (3-6-2) 0 0 — 0
Goals: O’Neill, Hoenisch, Bensch, Silva, Ferraro. Assists: Jakim, O’Neill, Silva, Wilke, Navroski. Shots: ND-15, N-4. Saves: ND-Wilke 4, N-Luckie 10.
Follow Rich Fisher on twitter @fish4scores