By Noam Gumerman
The Carolina Flyers play host to the San Diego Growlers in the first round of the UFA playoffs this Friday night at WakeMed Soccer Park. It’ll be the second meeting between these two teams this season, but the first since all the way back in Week 1. The Flyers walked out road victors, 22-20 over San Diego in a game that set the tone for this Carolina season.
It was the first of five games Carolina would play this regular season that finished within a two-point margin. Overall, they went 3-2 across those close games and got a lot of experience in high-pressure situations. And there were some especially wild endings Carolina took part in this season in those five games. There was the double-overtime thriller against Atlanta that required a heroic effort to snatch the win away from the Flyers. There was the home overtime victory in the finale of the season series between Carolina and Atlanta that just about knocked the Hustle out of the playoff picture. And most recently, there was the stunning late Carolina comeback against Austin that handed the Sol their only loss of the regular season.
This Flyers team is clearly battle-tested and ready for the playoffs. And they’ve only looked more and more threatening since the additions of Tobias Brooks and Zeke Thoreson midseason. Despite dropping their first game with their full roster to DC back in early June, Carolina has won five games in a row to end the season, including those two thrillers against Atlanta and Austin. Brooks and Thoreson have added another dimension to an already lights-out Flyers offense, with Brooks stretching the field with his throws and Thoreson with his legs.
Grayson Sanner and Jacob Fairfax create a completely dominant downfield cutting threat alongside Thoreson, as Sanner and Fairfax both finished the regular season inside the top ten across the UFA in goals scored. Allan Laviolette returned to the Carolina O-line after missing much of the regular season with an injury and looked extremely effective as well. If this Flyers O-line is clicking on all cylinders for 48 minutes, there is no team in the division or even the league that has an answer to every piece.
And if that O-line isn’t in sync, the Flyers defense has proven over the last several weeks they can step up to the challenge and turn the game around on their own. Carolina is the only team in the UFA to have three different players with at least 15 blocks on the season, with Cooper Williams, Drew Swanson, and Matt Tucker all having monster seasons on defense for Carolina. But the defensive unit excels with its depth more than anything, and has proven over and over again that anyone on the field can make a play to flip the momentum of a game when they really need to.
Carolina rolls into this game against San Diego as the favorites. They’ve won five straight and are among the hottest teams in the league. The Growlers had a bumpier road to the playoffs, ending up in as many close games as the Flyers were in but just ending up on the wrong side of a couple more than Carolina was. They’ve won four straight games themselves. However, they haven’t played a team other than Houston or Las Vegas in close to six weeks. Will they be ready to handle this deep Carolina team on the road?
Find out Friday at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, or on watchufa.tv.
