NOTEBOOK: Harvard Can’t Capitalize on Flood’s Faceoff Wins

For 68 minutes on Saturday evening, John Henry Flood kept the Harvard men’s lacrosse team in the game against Dartmouth. The junior midfielder won a career-high 25 of 29 faceoffs heading into the third overtime, and kept a Big Green offense—the Ivy League’s second-most prolific—off the field enough during the game to help the Crimson to a stunning 73-36 advantage in shots taken.

But Flood was unable to win his 30th and most important faceoff, one that Dartmouth controlled and used to score the game-winning goal just 26 seconds later in a 14-13 triple-overtime stunner in the team’s season-finale at Jordan Field.

Though the loss drops Harvard to .500 on the season at 6-6, the team has little time to sulk, having received its first invitation to the NCAA tournament in ten years.

But before learning of its opening-round date with Syracuse this weekend, the team’s focus was on how close the Crimson came to ending its regular season on a bright note.

“We kind of wasted his effort,” Harvard coach Scott Anderson said. “I don’t even know what the statistics were for the game, but it was unbelievable.”

Flood helped the Crimson gain control of the ball in the first two overtimes.

But missed opportunities on the offensive end proved to be Harvard’s downfall.

None came closer than junior attackman Evan Calvert’s shot in front of the goal near the end of the second extra frame, which missed sealing it for the Crimson by inches.

“Over the course of the overtimes we had possession probably two-thirds or three-quarters of the time, because John Henry was doing such a good job on faceoffs,” Anderson said.

Despite the dominating performance at midfield, what Flood will remember most about Saturday’s game was the one that he let slip away.

“It’s just my job to go out there and just try to pick up the ball,” Flood said.

“Unfortunately, in the last overtime, it just squirted the wrong way. What can you say?”

DEFENSELESS

Though Harvard took more than twice as many shots as the Big Green and Dartmouth made almost twice as many saves (23 to the Crimson’s 12), the Big Green still managed to pad its offensive numbers thanks to a feeble defensive effort.

Flood’s control of faceoffs helped keep Dartmouth possessions to a minimum. But when they did have the ball, the team had no trouble putting points on the board.

“Defensively, we just made mistakes that we had not made all year,” Anderson said. “Just a lot of broken situation stuff, and they’re a team that takes advantage of unsettled play.”

“Opportunistic” was the word used by Flood to describe the Big Green attack, a sentiment echoed by senior midfielder Sean Kane.

“They’re a very opportunistic team, and they capitalized on a lot of mistakes of ours,” an emotional Kane said after his final game at Jordan Field. “The way the ball bounces...sometimes just doesn’t go your way, and I guess that’s the way it went tonight.

“We have a great group of defensemen but a lot of times when the ball gets loose, people push on us and kind of catch us,” he added.

“WE HATE HARVARD”

Things got uncharacteristically heated just over five minutes into the third quarter when Dartmouth attackman Ryan Danehy threw Flood’s stick into the Big Green bench after the two battled all the way to the sideline after a faceoff. Danehy was called for unsportsmanlike conduct on the play and things settled down for the most part after that, but the bi-partisan crowd was sure to let everyone know where there loyalties lied.

Chants of “We hate Harvard” and “Dartmouth sucks,” as well as a number of other unprintable cries, rained down from the crowd of 1,310, reinforcing a comment made by co-captain Tom Mikula earlier in the week.

“I kind of hate Dartmouth,” he said.

The feelings appeared to be mutual.

NOT DONE YET

After the game on Saturday, it appeared that Harvard wouldn’t be invited to the tournament, but the selection committee was especially kind to the Ivy League, giving the conference four bids....Goalie Joe Pike played the entire game for just second time all season, making 12 saves on the evening. The freshman usually shares time with sophomore Evan O’Donnell in goal, but O’Donnell missed the game due to a virus. “That’s the reason we’ve been playing two goalies,” Anderson said. “If something like that happened we’d have a guy ready to go.”...The first of Calvert’s three goals on Saturday struck the net with such force that it actually tore a hole in the goal, causing a slight delay in the game. Fittingly, Calvert holds the team-lead in points, having scored 38 on the season.

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.