It’s No. 1 vs. No. 2, a national championship rematch, with Olympians facing Olympians, the highest-powered offense vs. a tested defense – the narratives for the yearly Crosstown Splashdown between UCLA and USC continue to stack up.
And so, Daily Bruin Sports reached out to one of the Daily Trojan’s men’s water polo beat writers, Keith Demolder, to dive into what characterizes this year’s matchup.
Daily Bruin Sports: In your opinion, what’s the best storyline concerning these two teams for this year’s scheduled conference matchup?
Keith Demolder: I think more than anything this game isn’t a game about being a UCLA-USC rivalry. Obviously it’s a big part, but what I’ve gotten from the guys … it’s about this team that beat them last year. I don’t think they even care about the rivalry per se, they just want to beat them. The teams this year that have beat us, it’s been Cal, which is our only loss, but this game against UCLA, it’s like their Super Bowl, and it could be a potential precursor to yet another national championship.
It’s a rematch, more so focused on the teams and not the schools. They have a lot of really good freshmen Marin Dasic, Thomas Dustan – he’s one of the top recruits out of high school and also on the Olympic team – so they’re locked and loaded and they’re looking for revenge for sure … I think that’s the storyline. It’s about revenge, not for the rivalry’s sake but for the team’s sake.
DB Sports: USC, like UCLA, seems to have a system-based approach to the game, rather than relying heavily on one or a few players like Cal or Stanford. Would you agree?
KD: No doubt. They have their roles and all the players play their roles very well. There’s not really one big guy … but I think if you’re trying to win championships that having a “system” or having a formula really works well, because if one guy goes down, the next guy is right there to fill his spot.
I think a really underrated part of USC’s plan is that they have so much depth. I think something like 16 players on the bench played against San Jose State, and that’s unheard of. San Jose had five (while) we had 16, so the fact that we have so many top-rated guys at our dispense, in our arsenal, is lethal.
So just in terms of offensive and defensive schematics, it’s very ridged. On defense there’s kind of like a three pronged, three wave approach – there’s the outside guys, the middle guys, and the inside guys who are trying to protect (goalkeeper) McQuin Baron, and so it works really well because guys stick to their roles. And while some teams rely on that one player to make an outstanding play, to go out and do something, we really methodically move as a team. It’s not flashy but it gets the job done in the end.
[Related: Matt Farmer brings in water polo expertise from the Midwest]
DB Sports: Junior driver Matteo Morelli after the Cal-USC game in an interview with the Pac-12 said that he thinks Baron is the best goalie in the country. UCLA has Cutino Award winner and 2015 Divison I Player of the Year Garrett Danner, so it has to be asked – when it comes to these two, who has the upper hand?
KD: It’s really hard to say skillwise who’s better because I think they both have the technique and the intangibles down, and I will say I think they’re pretty dead even. If I had to pick, I’d have to go with Baron, just because he has the ability to stop shots from point-blank range. When you’d least expect him to he’s able to get that really clutch stop.
That said, I think the defense of USC does an excellent job of keeping the ball away, the only way really that teams are able to get shots on goal is if they get one really close, or they fire a random one from the point … I’d have to give a lot of credit to the defense, and even talking to Dasic he says the No. 1 thing that they emphasize is their defense. They don’t care about scoring goals, they don’t care about being flashy or anything, they just want to play good defense and when they don’t they really get hard on themselves.
But to answer your question, I’d have to say Baron because he’s been tested at a higher level, and I know your guys’ goalkeeper is really good as well and has been tested at equally higher levels, but I just think that given his Olympic experience and stuff he has a very slight upper edge.
DB Sports: USC comes into this game with the best offense in the nation, averaging 16 goals a match. The UCLA defense has kept Big Four teams to under seven goals a game, but it’s fair to say the Bruins haven’t been tested with as mature of an offense as the Trojans’ this year. Thoughts?
KD: To the point of defense being better than it was last year, what some guys were telling me was that the defense sets up the offense. When they’re able to get stops, they’re then able to score because they have that momentum, and a lot of their goals they score off of fast breaks or on ensuing possessions, so I think that given how good their defense is to stop opponents, it’s really given the offense a lot of confidence.
They know that even if they have their shot blocked or something goes wrong that they can still go back on defense and get the ball back quickly. And going back to what I said earlier about how there’s no superstar, Morelli is a beast to put it simply, and also there’s a lot of other guys that can go off at any time and light up the stat sheet. James Walters had a hat trick last game and he only scored like ten goals in the season before it.
It just goes to show that there’s so much talent scoring-wise on this USC team that you’d have to think that somebody can get it past UCLA this Saturday, so I don’t know which side will inevitably win, maybe it will be a huge scoring contest maybe it won’t, but I know that in the end USC is going to definitely give UCLA a lot of fight.
[Related: Offense picks up pace as men’s water polo defeats San Jose State, Whittier]
DB Sports: This year is the first time since 2005 that the two teams haven’t played each other before their scheduled conference game. Taking the other storylines into account, just how much do we not know what’s going to happen in this game?
KD: I definitely think that it’s going to have an impact, and I think the reason why we beat Cal two weeks ago was because we saw them earlier in the season.
When you see a team, when you play them versus when you watch them on film are two different things. And so the players are hungry for this one. They’re so ready for UCLA, but the fact of the matter is that they don’t know what to expect when they get in the pool. Because it’s one thing to look at them on paper and look on their film and actually be in the water with them.
… I think it’s advantageous for both sides, in that you guys see us, we see you, and we could change game plans. Also it could be a double-edged sword too, if we had played you guys earlier in the season and we won by like five goals or something, that could give us false confidence and maybe we would anticipate a similar game plan to what we saw in the first game, whereas this time we’re completely blind
And so I think it’ll make us more prepared in the sense that we’ll prepare for everything, whereas if we saw you guys once we would maybe prepare for one or two things. The mystery is good for both sides because you really don’t know what to expect.