OT LAX: Cornell lacrosse at Yale

At the half, Cornell leads Yale in New Haven by the score of 8-4. The game was moved to a 4 pm start. Sounds like Haswell's having a big day; lots of unsettled play. I'm too distracted by hockey stuff to provide any more details.

Quick backgrounder: It's the Ivy opener for Cornell. UNC loss was very bad. Yale was supposed to be mediocre, but they crushed Penn within the last week or so. Yale has some dangerous offensive players. CU has totally owned Y in recent years, jumping out to HUGE first half leads in the last three years. Another very cold game.

Cornell 11 - Yale 5, middle of 3rd q.

12-6 with 11 min to go

Since I wasn't able to find a place to watch the hockey game on TV, I attended the lacrosse game at Yale. It was the first CU lacrosse game I'd seen in many years, and it was an impressive win for the Big Red, albeit against a mediocre opponent, which frequently gave the ball away with sloppy passes, etc. Our offense and passing was too quick for Yale's defense, and our long stick defensemen scored two goals on fast breaks and almost had a third. After being burned a few times early in the game (we trailed 2-1) our defense made some adjustments and started sliding much better and double teaming at the perfect times. Our goalie looked good as well. The main area of concern was faceoffs, most of which we lost. That's been a problem all year, and against the top teams it will be difficult to overcome. Yale took a lot of penalties, and at one point in the fourth quarter had three players in the box, giving us a 6-on-3, which we scored on! The final score was 15-6.
As an aside, the Cornell fans came close to outnumbering the Yale fans, although they are much more sedate, in general, than hockey fans. Most of them, though, were parents and other relatives of the CU players.

Too bad we couldn't have used some of the extra goals against Army or NC. Not that it happens that way, but still ...

Gotta love ESPNU's growing pains. I'm watching a tape of the Cornell-OSU hockey game replayed by ESPNU at 1am this morning, and the ticker at the bottom of the screen gives the score of our lacrosse game as: Cornell 15, New Haven 6.