Senior attackman Mike Faught racked up eight goals and added two assists as the Crimson men's lacrosse team lambasted a thoroughly outclassed Williams team, 17-5, at the Business School field yesterday.
Faught, a second-team All-Ivy and honorable mention All-American player last year when he collected 58 goals, ripped his high-velocity shots past Williams netminder Bill Child seven times in the second half--five in the fourth quarter--to raise his team-leading season goal total to 27.
Faught opened the scoring for the Crimson with a pretty dodge and shot after eight minutes of a fairly lackluster first period had elapsed. Although Harvard's talented defense completely shut down the somewhat disorganized Ephmen attack and the Crimson monopolized the ground ball market, the team had taken no less than 19 fruitless shots before Faught finally broke the ice.
Then came the deluge. With only a minute gone in the second period. Faught's roommate and aggressive teammate Jamie Egasti converted a Crimson extra-man advantage into a 2-0 lead after taking a feed from Faught.
A minute and a half later, shifty Crimson attackman Mike Ward ended one of a series of successful fast breaks with the first of his two goals.
By halftime, Norman Forbush, Gordic Nelson, Egasti, Gerry Kelleher and Billy Forbush had all added their names to the list of perpetrators of the massacre. Nelson and Ward tossed in additional tallies early in the second half before Faught unleashed his seven-goal barrage.
The real stars of the game for the Crimson, however, were its unsavory (to opponents, anyway) crew of underclassmen defensemen--Scott Pink, Frank Prezioso, and Haywood Miller. The Ephmen attack consistently had difficulty getting the ball into the box, let alone moving it toward the cage. "Our defensive pressure was outstanding," Crimson coach and one-time national scoring champion (at Brown) Bob Scalise noted afterwards.
Scalise's troops, with liberal doses of substitutes in the second half, scooped up 65 ground balls to Williams' 36 and uncorked 61 shots while the beleaguered Ephmen managed only 21.
The director of Harvard's targeted missile program was, of course, Faught. The Wilton, Conn., native launched most of his sizzling projectiles from his favorite spot just to the right of the enemy cage, often taking passes from some extremely unselfish teammates who had open shots themselves. Faught appears to be hitting his stride just in time, as he will now have to fill the scoring shoes of injured All-American teammate Pete Predun.
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