T.W. Johnson didn’t see any difference Tuesday from the previous six times he’s coached against Syracuse.

The Hobart head coach saw Jeremy Thompson and Josh Amidon work together in a two-on-one that ended with an Amidon laser shot into the top left corner for the first goal of the game. From the start, he saw a relentless Orange attack throughout the game that was both balanced and efficient.

Syracuse’s offense has not been the team’s strongpoint this season. But while the offensive dominance may have been new to this SU team, Johnson was used to seeing it from the Orange.

‘I’ve played them for seven years now, and to be honest, it’s the same every year,’ he said. ‘They’ve got talented guys. They have a lot of them. They have the ability to go on runs at any point during the game.’

Ten different players scored for No. 4 SU (11-1, 3-0 Big East) in its 13-7 win over the Statesmen (5-7) Tuesday in the Carrier Dome, keeping the Kraus-Simmons trophy in Syracuse for the fifth straight season.

The Orange offense played perhaps its most consistent game of the season in front of 4,340 fans, not relying on one short burst but finding ways to score throughout the game. And that brought back the memories of dangerous, high-flying SU attacks from recent years.

‘I think we’ve tried to play like that all year long,’ Syracuse head coach John Desko said. ‘We don’t rely on just one player to get it done for us offensively. … We believe in that. It’s team play.’

All year long, the Orange offense has struggled. SU has failed to reach double digits in five of its 12 games. Those include two five-goal performances and SU’s only loss when it scored six goals against Cornell.

Even when Syracuse has reached double figures, the team has gone quarters at a time floundering on the offensive end while opponents forge comebacks.

This time, Hobart tried to shut down Syracuse’s offense at first with a 1-3-2 zone, a new defensive wrinkle the Orange had not yet seen this year. But Thompson and Amidon quickly solved that defense.

The two senior midfielders stood 15 yards away from the goal on opposite hash marks. Thompson got possession and forced the single Hobart defender to slide over to him. Thompson quickly flipped the ball over to Amidon on the right hash, and Amidon did the rest for the 1-0 lead.

‘I think we executed much better,’ Desko said. ‘We ran the offenses. The guys really appeared to understand what we were trying to accomplish. This is the time of year where you like to see those kinds of things.’

Hobart managed to stay with the Orange through the first quarter, as SU only held a 3-2 lead after 15 minutes. But SU took over in the second.

Jovan Miller ended a personal three-game scoring drought with a running shot from the right side on SU’s first possession of the period. Junior midfielder Bobby Eilers continued his strong showing in recent games with a goal four minutes later.

Kevin Drew then got into the mix on a transition goal. He was left unguarded in the middle of the field, and attack JoJo Marasco found him cutting to the net.

‘I’ve just been staying out a little more, get some offense going a little bit,’ said Drew, who had a career-high two goals in the game. ‘We’ve been working on fastbreaks every day in practice, so we’re just working on that.’

Syracuse’s leading scorer Stephen Keogh capped off that second-quarter run by scooping up a rebound on the crease and finishing with a putback a minute after Drew’s first score. That put the lead at 7-2, and Hobart would never close the margin to less than three goals throughout the game.

The key for SU’s offense Tuesday was that mix of the primary and secondary scorers. Syracuse got its expected contributions from Keogh, Amidon, Thompson and Marasco, all of whom had at least two points in the game.

But the additional scoring from Eilers, Drew, Pete Coleman and defender Matt Harris turned an average offensive performance into one of SU’s better scoring games this year.

‘I think we executed much better,’ Desko said. ‘We ran the offenses. The guys really appeared to understand what we were trying to accomplish. This is the time of year where you really want to see those kinds of things.’

zjbrown@syr.edu

Published on April 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm