The Notre Dame men’s soccer team finished its regular season with a rough result on Friday at No. 5 Duke. The Blue Devils toppled the Fighting Irish by a 4-0 score at Koskinen Stadium in Durham, North Carolina, sending the Irish on the road to start the ACC Tournament. Seeded 10th in the conference, Notre Dame (7-4-5, 3-3-2 ACC) will visit seventh-seeded Stanford at 9 p.m. on Wednesday. Duke, meanwhile, has the third seed and will host Virginia Tech two hours earlier.
Friday’s match kept Notre Dame without a clear solution between the posts. The Irish entered the night with back-to-back shutout wins after switching to graduate goalie Collin Travasos a week and a half earlier. Duke presented a much stiffer challenge than UIC and Cal and put four goals in behind Travasos on 16 total shots.
The first Blue Devil goal arrived in the 13th minute on a screamer of a shot from Colton Pleasants. The graduate midfielder stepped up to the right corner of the 18-yard box, smashing a right-footed shot toward the far post. With Travasos diving out to his right, the ball struck the confluence of the left post and the crossbar, dropping into the goal for a 1-0 Duke lead.
Moments later, Duke rang the crossbar again with a distant blast from Kenan Hot, but this one struck the top and stayed out. Soon after, Drew Kerr put a curling left-footed strike just wide from the top of the 18.
As the first half whittled away, Notre Dame began to even out the action. In the 36th minute, Adam Luckhurst followed a couple of light Irish chances with a centralized header from nine yards out. The redirection angled toward the left post, forcing a sprawling save from Travasos, his best of the night. Three minutes later, Notre Dame found its best look of the night. Junior midfielder KK Baffour made a cutback to his left foot inside the 18, ripping a shot right at Duke goalkeeper Wessel Speel. Reaching to his right, Speel cut down the high-velocity strike, and his teammates neutralized the rebound.
At halftime, Duke led 1-0 with a 7-5 advantage in shots.
Just over five minutes into the second half, Duke doubled its lead, overwhelming the Irish backline with quick ball movement. Kerr centered the ball from the right side of the 18 toward the top of the 6-yard box, where top Blue Devil scorer Ulfur Bjornsson one-timed the service past Travasos. The Icelandic striker’s 12th goal of the season had Duke ahead 2-0 in the 51st minute.
Duke nearly struck again 65 seconds after the Bjornsson goal, but Pleasants sent a missile of a 22-yard half-volley just past the left post. Notre Dame would eventually come back with a couple of looks in the attacking third, but the Irish struggled to control the ball and generate shots in scoring areas. Their best chance of the sequence stemmed from a quickly taken free kick in the 73rd minute. Junior midfielder Sebastian Green ran behind the Duke defense, flagging the ball down but sending it wide of the far post.
Notre Dame would keep the pressure on into the 79th minute, when another set piece nearly put the Irish on the board. Senior midfielder Bryce Boneau headed a free kick that deflected its way on goal, forcing a diving, one-handed save from Speel.
After that point, the wheels fell off for Notre Dame. An 83rd-minute challenge from Travasos sent Duke to the penalty spot, where Luckhurst slotted home the third Blue Devil goal of the match. Forty seconds later, Baffour went in for a hard challenge that resulted in his second yellow card in a seven-minute span. With the Irish down to 10 men on the red card, Duke closed out the match with Jack Zugay’s first goal of the season. The 88th-minute strike from 20 yards out beat Travsasos inside the left post, bringing the match to its final score of 4-0.
With a 10th-place finish in the ACC standings, the Irish will head to Stanford for the ACC Tournament’s first round. Notre Dame squared off with the Cardinal at Alumni Stadium on Sept. 14, with Stanford holding on to a 1-0 win despite playing with 10 men for virtually the entire second half. The Cardinal are now ranked 22nd in the country after finishing the regular season 8-4-4 overall and 3-2-3 in ACC play. Stanford did not finish the campaign well, going 0-3-3 after the calendar flipped from September to October.
Notre Dame hasn’t won a conference tournament match since 2021, the year it won the ACC Championship en route to a College Cup berth. The Irish fell to Clemson when they went on the road in 2022 and took an upset loss at home to Louisville last year.
