UNC wins high-scoring battle vs. Blue Devils

DURHAM — With less than two minutes remaining in Thursday’s contest, and North Carolina clinging to a one-goal lead, Courtney Jones dribbled deep into Duke’s defensive third, loosely marked with yards of green before her.

Considering the 4-3 score, most soccer strategists would urge Jones to dribble to the corner, keep the ball off Blue Devil feet and drain the clock.

But in Thursday’s see-saw affair, UNC coach Anson Dorrance did not want to take that risk. Instead, he urged Jones goalward, and the junior striker proved worth the gamble.

Jones sliced past her defender to the end line, drew Duke keeper Tara Campbell off her line and calmly slotted the ball across goal to an unmarked Kealia Ohai, who tapped it home from six yards out to seal the Tar Heels’ 5-3 victory against the Blue Devils at Koskinen Stadium.

“Once Duke went with a two-back, (I told Jones) we’ve got to take advantage of that, and I’m glad we did,” Dorrance said.

“It didn’t look for a while like four goals was going to win it.”

What began as a one-sided affair firmly dominated by the Tar Heels quickly turned into a wide-open shootout that saw seven goals scored during the final 52 minutes of play, generating the most combined goals between the two teams since 1993.

After dominating the game’s opening thirty minutes, UNC found itself in a furious fight to the finish.

“It’s really emotionally tiring when we keep going up and then they come back and score again,” Ohai said. “It’s really frustrating and it gets just emotionally really hard.

“At the end when we got that (goal), we finally could relax and say, ‘This game is ours.’”

On the strength of Jones’ first goal — she would finish with three — on the night in the 21st minute, UNC held a 1-0 edge leading into the final minutes of the opening stanza and appeared in complete control of the night’s proceedings.

But a 39th-minute long ball from Duke’s Alex Straton floated over the head of sophomore defender Megan Brigman and onto the foot of Mollie Pathman, who laced a shot into the bottom left corner of the net, tying the score and sending the Senior Night crowd into a frenzy.

But junior Emmalie Pfankuch answered for UNC just more than three minutes later, taking Ali Hawkins’ 2-on-1 feed and nudging the ball past the charging keeper to put UNC back in front heading into the half.

Jones then seemed to further deflate the Blue Devils just 36 seconds into the second half, deflecting Ohai’s cross between Campbell’s legs to put the Tar Heels ahead 3-1, a lead they would hold for more than 22 minutes.

Duke drew within one on a 68th-minute breakaway score by Chelsea Canepa, but Jones returned the margin to two shortly thereafter, dispossessing Natasha Anasi deep in the Duke zone before completing her hat trick on a strike into the left side of the frame.

Still, the Blue Devils refused to go quietly, cutting the lead to 4-3 on a brilliantly driven volley by Pathman into the upper right corner of UNC’s net.

The North Carolina goal brought the Duke crowd to its feet for the last 10 minutes of action, but Ohai’s 89th-minute tally silenced the stadium and sealed the Tar Heel victory.

“I could just tell by the energy and the way we were fighting that we weren’t going to let that team win,” Jones said.

Contact the Sports Editor at sports@unc.edu.