Month: July 2021

Takeaways: Thorns 1, Dash 0

Post author By Jaiden Cirioli
Post date July 25, 2021

Photo by Nikita Taparia

From the second the whistle blew, the Thorns looked like they were going to dominate the Dash, with Sophia Smith scoring the fastest Thorns goal ever 32 seconds into the match. However, Smith’s goal would be the only one that Portland scored that night, holding the Dash to a 1–0 win on the road.

As a team who has “struggled with scoring,” said Kelli Hubly after the match,” it was really special to score early on the road.” Putting themselves on the board early was a needed confidence boost. However, the Thorns struggled to add to that tally, despite playing a great defensive game.

Here are a couple of my takeaways from the match:

1. 90-minute defensive mentality

The Thorns were dominant against the Pride last week, holding a 2–0 lead for 93 minutes. Then, in the last minute of stoppage time, they conceded on a strike from outside the box. This week against the Dash, the Thorns immediately worked on correcting their mistakes, remaining committed to defense until the very end of stoppage time.

The Thorns led the Dash on duels won, interceptions, tackles, and aerial duels, spread not just across the defense but the midfield and forwards as well. One area of defense where the Thorns did particularly well was tracking back on wide balls that Houston would attempt to play. By preventing players like Jasmyne Spencer and Makamae Gomera-Stevens from getting crosses or passes off inside the 18-yard box after quick turnovers, the Thorns successfully shut down most of the Dash’s shooting angles, giving Bella Bixby an easy job that night. The cohesion between Natalia Kuikka, Hubly, Emily Menges, and Meghan Klingenberg was evident.

After the match, Rocky Rodríguez spoke about the team’s defensive mentality, saying that they “had a lot to lose” and the Thorns “need to get better at closing out games, especially if [they] are winning.” Those last twenty minutes of the game are crucial to securing three points, and players have to keep working hard even as they are beginning to tire. Parsons’s substitutions, which slotted defensive players like Christen Westphal and Meaghan Nally into the midfield to help overwhelm Houston’s offensive-minded substitutions, worked. The Thorns’ game changers came in and locked down the win, bringing accurate passes and high pressure and holding Houston to only 13 shots. Rodríguez’s statement is true—the Thorns do need to work on closing out games—but they’re already showing improvement from last week.

2. Defense wins games, but scoring helps too

When Sophia Smith set the new club record for fastest goal, it seemed as though Portland was going to have another performance à la the season opener against Chicago, where they went up 4–0 in the first half.

Unfortunately, Smith’s goal was the only one for a Thorns side that has struggled to score in recent games. The Thorns have had no problem getting the ball into their attacking third. Last night, they had 50 more accurate passes in their attacking half than the Dash had on them, even without their midfield of international stars. Rodríguez, Angela Salem, and Celeste Boureille link up in the diamond well, and are able to control the ball and distribute to Smith, Simone Charley, and Marissa Everett, but where the Thorns are struggling is getting off that final cross or shot on goal. All players are rising to the occasion of getting more time than they had been seeing prior to the Olympics, and are beginning to find their groove and consistency with this new starting lineup.

While typically the Thorns outshoot their opponents two to one, against Houston they only registered 14 shots to the Dash’s 13. To the eye, that decrease was clear, with Charley and Smith often taking one too many touches before getting a cross blocked, or a defender crashing on them, neither one of them making an accurate cross on the night. With a team full of talented attackers and a midfield with good rates of distribution and control, there should be more shots on goal. Being able to set themselves up with a wider margin of goals will only complement the Thorns’ defense as they work on closing games without conceding more consistently.

Tags 2021, Houston Dash, Sophia Smith, Thorns

Soccer Timbers

Build the Statue

Post author By Kyle Pinnell
Post date July 22, 2021

Photo by Matthew Wolfe

Tags 100, 2021, Diego Valeri, El Maestro, LAFC, Timbers

Soccer Thorns

Takeaways: Thorns 2, Pride 1

Post author By Katelyn Best
Post date July 20, 2021

Photo by Kris Lattimore

The Thorns bested the Orlando Pride 2–1 on Sunday in a dominant performance capped off with a headed goal by Marissa Everett and a wondergoal by Sophia Smith. Marisa Viggiano’s freakish (in a good way) strike in second-half stoppage time capped the scoring off.

After the game, Mark Parsons pointed out that initially, Orlando stayed compact centrally and tried to keep the Thorns confined to wide areas. Forwards Crystal Thomas and Taylor Kornieck would drop down in the half spaces to help defend, but the Pride generally didn’t try to win the ball back there, instead aiming to keep Portland from passing into the center of the field. Here Kelli Hubly has just received the ball from Meghan Klingenberg. With Thomas and Kornieck flanking Meggie Dougherty Howard, the Pride have blocked off all the passing lanes toward the center.

Orlando did, however, let Portland switch the ball to the weak side. Just after the shot above, Hubly will send a long pass to Natalia Kuikka. The Pride generally didn’t attack the ball when Kuikka or Kling had it.

Because they weren’t challenged much out wide, Kuikka and Kling had a lot of time and space to create from those areas, either sending in crosses or combining with teammates who over- or underlapped them. They ended the game with 89 and 91 touches, respectively, and 51 and 59 passes. That’s around 20 more touches and ten more passes than each of them had last week against Gotham.

In the second half, Marc Skinner reorganized, benching midfielder Erika Tymrak, moving Syd Leroux to the wing, and bringing on forward Abi Kim to play in a 4-4-2 alongside Kornieck. Now the Pride did attack the ball on the wing, including when Kuikka and Kling were carrying it, but they tended to send only one player at a time to do so. That often meant that the two outside backs, who are both strong dribblers, simply bypassed the pressure and found a central pass.

I wrote in my last recap that one of the Thorns’ strengths is the consistency in the way they play each game, especially on the defensive side. They do try to win the ball on the wing (a subject for another post), and are often successful, presumably because the whole team has drilled that trap over and over again.

I’m not sure how you can expect to switch defensive strategies mid-game like Orlando did against a team that specifically does not do that and have things go well—especially, to be frank, given that the Thorns have better players! Outside backs Kylie Strom and Courtney Petersen both got beaten wide by the likes of Morgan Weaver, Smith, and the two outside backs multiple times, outclassed both skill-wise and physically, and looked very frustrated by the end of the first half.

To rewind a bit, when the Thorns don’t succeed in winning the ball on the wing, they know where they’re supposed to run after, and they all do it very quickly—again, presumably because they’ve practiced it a lot.

That’s another problem Orlando had: Portland got a number of good chances on transition simply because the Pride didn’t seem to think of that possibility and didn’t respond fast enough. The setup to Smith’s gorgeous strike is one example of this.

Below, center back Ali Krieger is winding up to take a free kick. Midfielder Dougherty Howard is open, but Krieger—maybe preemptively wary of Smith and Everett pressuring Dougherty Howard from behind?—is going to pass to Petersen, pushed out of frame up on the left wing, where the arrow points.

This one is blurry, so I circled the ball. It wasn’t a good kick, so it’s falling in the direction of the arrow, to the feet of Rocky Rodríguez, not Petersen. It’s hard to tell in the screenshot, but Smith is anticipating where Rodríguez will pass: ahead of her run, into the massive Orlando-free space that’s there because five of the team’s outfield players were just pushing toward goal.

Rodríguez indeed passes there—with a clever first-touch tap—and Smith is basically free and clear to sprint up Portland’s right wing. Petersen chases her, getting in a shove from behind at one point, but Smith keeps running, stays outside Orlando’s stranded center backs, and fires off a sweet right-footed strike from the top of the 18.

Tags 2021, Meghan Klingenberg, natalia kuikka, Orlando Pride, Thorns

Soccer Timbers

Back Four, Back Five, Defensive Midfield: Center Back Bill Tuiloma is the Timbers’ Do-it-all Defender

Post author By Kyle Pinnell
Post date July 6, 2021

Photo by Kris Lattimore

Tags Bill, defense, Timbers, Tuiloma

Soccer Thorns

Thorns 2, Louisville 0: Takeaways: Stream of Consciousness Edition

Post author By Katelyn Best
Post date July 4, 2021
1 Comment on Thorns 2, Louisville 0: Takeaways: Stream of Consciousness Edition

Photo by Nikita Taparia

The Thorns earned a comfortable if unspectacular three points on the road today against Racing Louisville FC. With much of the starting lineup away with the US and Canadian national teams to prepare for the Olympics, we saw a return to a B-side Thorns lineup that we’ve gotten pretty familiar with by now.

So far we’ve always done these recaps in a list format, but I don’t feel like doing that tonight, so I’m just going to let this one ~flow~.

Something I find interesting about this iteration of the Thorns is the consistency of tactics from game to game, regardless of lineup or opponent. It’s not like they don’t adjust at all, but they’ve played the same formation since the 2020 Challenge Cup, and their defensive strategy, especially, is very consistent regardless of who’s on the field. This hasn’t always been Mark Parsons’s approach; the first few years I covered the team saw them deploy multiple shapes in each season and use pressing systems that changed depending on player availability.

What’s remarkable about this on the defensive side is that in the past, when the back line wasn’t consistent—often the case when Emily Sonnett and Ellie Carpenter were in and out of national team camps and players like Emily Menges and Meghan Klingenberg dealt with injuries—its performance suffered. But this season has already seen at least as much defensive turnover as any past Parsons season (I think it’s more, but I’m not going to dig up my 2017–2018 notebook to check, sorry), and the team has the third fewest goals allowed in the league, behind North Carolina and the ungodly lucky Gotham FC.

I’m… not sure why that is. It might be as simple as “the team has a lot of depth,” which they do. But it feels like there’s more than that—the press is so organized and effective, and the team’s quality in that area changes basically not at all, regardless of lineup.

Anyway, back to today: we did see some changes, importantly with Celeste Boureille and Marissa Everett slotting in for Lindsey Horan and Christine Sinclair. With Crystal Dunn also out, Rocky Rodríguez and Angela Salem both started, where they’ve been tagging in for each other. Those changes did make a difference offensively; there’s simply no replacing the creative genius those players provide, and the Thorns spent most of their attacking energy moving up the wings, and quite a bit of it sending in aimless crosses. On that point, though, it also has to be said that Louisville did well to stay compact centrally and force the Thorns wide. They didn’t press high, and once they dropped into their defensive block, Portland wasn’t able to break them down.

The Thorns’ distribution actions against Louisville (attacking toward the top). I am so sorry about the absolutely godawful quality, but the website only works for me on mobile now. Hopefully you can see my point, which is the little pocket around the 18 where there’s not much going on. Also note the number of crosses, and their redness.

On the other hand—and this brings me back to my earlier point about the defense—Boureille did a bang-up job defensively, notching three tackles and running the length of the field, Horan-like, throughout the 90 minutes. Angela Salem, as always, was a bulldog, shutting down the handful of Louisville attacks that made their way into Portland’s defensive third, and ending the game with four chances created.

The Everett-Sinc difference is even bigger, and probably represents the biggest change in what the team is capable of going forward. Everett does the hard defensive work well, and she managed to get into the box at the right moment a number of times, but she is simply not Christine Sinclair, OC, and she’s not the same kind of link between the midfield and the forwards as the captain is.

So in short, where the full Thorns team can score any number of ways, this lineup was more or less limited to a subset of that toolbox: set pieces, balls over the top, and quick transition plays. They had a few decent looks on transition in the first half, but ultimately either lacked precision in finishing or hesitated too long and couldn’t move the ball fast enough through the final third.

But the goals came anyway, the first from a confidently shot Rocky Rodríguez penalty (after she was fouled off a corner kick), and the second when Simone Charley found the end of a sweet lofted pass by Menges (after a corner kick Kling took short), marking the defender’s first-ever Thorns assist.

The game had been all but over for a while by the time the thing this game will be remembered for happened. Fifteen-year-old Olivia Moultrie usurped Ellie Carpenter as the youngest-ever player to get minutes in an NWSL game when she subbed in for Salem after 83 minutes. And after all the noise around whether she should be allowed to sign a professional contract, the lawsuit, the media blitz, the numberless tweets—perhaps unsurprisingly, she was fine. She didn’t stand out as great, but she didn’t get bodied, either. She won the ball a couple times, lost it a couple, made some passes. Pretty standard stuff for a late-game sub, which is very impressive given her age.