The Thorns fell to Chicago on Saturday night in a disappointing 2–1 road loss. It was the two teams’ second and final meeting this NWSL season, and had a very different tone to it than the 5–0 thrashing courtesy of the Thorns to start the season.
There aren’t many words to describe the game besides “un-Thorns-like.” From the whistle, the Thorns seemed to lack pace and the drive to press, and the momentum of the first half was firmly in favor of the Red Stars. The Thorns opened the scoring, but they did so against the run of play, and the instantaneous response from Chicago was emblematic, so let’s break that down.
It’s rare for Bella Bixby to make a major fumble that leads to a goal, but she made several against Chicago. Right before the above still, Bixby had come off her line to collect a cross, but spilled it out of her hands. However, because there were no Thorns following the players making runs into the box, Chicago was able to shoot on an open net. The Thorns outnumbered the Red Stars five to three in the box, and should have been first to the ball.
While it’s important for the defense to be confident in their keeper and listen when they call for the ball (which may or may not have happened—the broadcast was as silent as a golf broadcast), they also need to be covering the open spaces. Inside the box, I would argue that it is much more important to mark a player than it is to mark space, and by not doing this Chicago was able to score an easy tying goal.
In the post-match press conference, Crystal Dunn, Christine Sinclair, and Mark Parsons all had similar sentiments about how the speed Chicago equalized with was a “cardinal sin” and reflected how the half had been going for the team.
Dunn said “the equalizer took the momentum out of us, and it was hard to find it again. We came out of the second half looking to give it everything we had.”
Unfortunately, the Thorns weren’t able to find their rhythm in the second half either. Parsons said that he was “frustrated with the way the team played, both individually and collectively,” saying that coming back from an international break where six players and the head coach were on international duty made it hard to quickly find connections, especially when the first game back was away from home.
At half, the Thorns made three subs, but this triple change may have ended up hindering the connections even more by removing two midfielders and one defender, the areas where the Thorns were struggling most with possession. Let’s take a look at the second goal the Red Stars scored that night.
In this (very poor) screenshot, you can see the Chicago player (Rachel Hill) is closer to the goal than the Thorns player (Meghan Klingenberg?), allowing her to easily get the header that results in the point. Even though there are far more white shirts than black ones on the screen, what really matters is backtracking fast enough to get goalside.
The buildup came from a cross that the Red Stars were able to get off with relatively little pressure. The lack of shutting down space was a common trend for the Thorns throughout the game. Normally the team with the strongest midfield, the Thorns were outplayed and exploited, and were unable to gain the momentum the second half.
One thing that is curious is that even though the Thorns walked away feeling disappointed in their outcome and performance, the stats show a different story. They had 59% possession and 396 accurate passes, 150 more than the Red Stars made. The Thorns’ accuracy was also 79% compared to Chicago’s 71%. So, what went wrong?
The Thorns’ identity, which they have been cultivating all season, relies on a high press and building up out of the back, neither of which they were able to accurately employ during the game. The two midfielders who played 90 minutes, Dunn and Angela Salem, actually had more touches than they did against North Carolina, but like possession, that’s another statistic that yielded little in the way of results. Unable to be playmakers, the midfield was dimmed and couldn’t connect the backline and the forwards.
When the tactical numbers are still high, questions of mentality begin to arise. Here, Parsons says that the team was having a hard time mentally, as they were “unable to find a way when things weren’t going as planned.”
Despite the unexpected outcome, the Thorns are optimistic going forward, knowing they have a full week of training with the entire team ahead of them. The time at home and together can only benefit the team both mentally and physically, as they find time to recharge and reconnect with one another on the field.
After the game, Sinc speculated that the team bus catching on fire last week may have been a bad omen. Hopefully this week is fire-free.
Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
In 2015, Meghan Klingenberg was a standout with the US national team. At the World Cup that year, she started every game for a back line that conceded just three goals—including a Julie Ertz own goal—all tournament. She had a moment in the spotlight with a dramatic goal-line save against Sweden to rescue a clean sheet. There was no reason to suspect the 26-year-old would be on the bubble just over a year later.
But that’s exactly what happened. At the beginning of 2018, Kling was dropped for good, with little noise and less ceremony. That’s what happens when you get cut. There’s no party. One day you’re there, the next you’re not.
“It was really hard,” she remembers. “I had a lot of bitterness about it.”
The story of Kling’s break from the national team wasn’t fully told at the time. In 2016, after the Americans’ ill-fated Olympics run, she suffered a back injury, which the USWNT staff identified as a pulled muscle. In fact, it was a more severe injury that required surgery, and the misdiagnosis set her recovery timeline back significantly.
After recovering from surgery, Kling set about getting back to her 2015 form. She made a strong case for herself in the 2017 Thorns season, establishing herself as a key piece in the offense—a role she still plays today. She notched seven assists that season, the third-most in the league after Kristie Mewis and Nahomi Kawasumi; she was the only defender to record more than three. At the end of that season, the Thorns won the championship.
Photo by Matthew Wolfe
But she never really worked her way back into the national team conversation. From an outsider’s perspective, what’s especially baffling—insulting, frankly—is the lengths the team went to in their search for outside backs leading up to the 2019 World Cup.
Jill Ellis’s staff tried converting Sofia Huerta, a failed experiment that nonetheless prompted Huerta to move from the Red Stars to the Dash; they gave famous homophobe Jaelene Daniels (née Hinkle) a second chance after she’d refused to play in a Pride Month jersey. For their part, the stans—many of them, anyway—wanted Ali Krieger back in the picture and howled for blood every time she was left out of a lineup. We all know how the search ended: with Crystal Dunn, one of the most dangerous attacking players in the world, becoming a locked-in starter at left back.
All that happened because the foregone conclusion, before she’d even had the chance to recover fully, was that Kling’s time was over.
That was a blow. “It felt unfair to not be given a chance with the national team, knowing that I had this injury that they had misdiagnosed for a long time,” she remembers. It’s one thing to get fired because you messed up; it’s another to get punished for someone else’s mistake.
“I could not find joy in the game. I was just playing to get back to where I was.”
Zen master Dongshan Liangjie of Mount Dong said to the assembly, “Experience going beyond Buddha and say a word.”
A monastic asked him, “What is saying a word?”
Dongshan said, “When you say a word, you don’t hear it.”
The monastic said, “Do you hear it?”
Dongshan said, “When I am not speaking, I hear it.”
But that was then. Times have changed.
“I guess the only way that I can put it is that the past doesn’t exist, and the future isn’t real.”
I’m talking to Kling in the stands at Providence Park on a warm day in August. We both have masks on; hers is gray plaid with a Pittsburgh Steelers logo. 2015 was a lifetime ago. Longer—a different plane of existence. The whole Trump administration sits between now and then.
“All we have right now,” she continues, “is this moment right here in front of us. And we get to choose what we want to do with it. If we want to be distracted and not be here, present, we can choose to do that… I think when we choose presence, a lot of other things happen because of that.”
For Kling, this wasn’t an easy lesson to learn. It’s not a mindset that comes easily to professional athletes, for whom performance matters, and hypercompetitiveness is a job requirement. But excellence is paradoxical: the more you fixate on results—on the free kick you whiffed or the bad day you had in training—the less you focus on the process of getting the results. A focus on winning turns into a fear of losing. That fear plagued her, even as she remained a key player for the Thorns through 2018 and 2019.
“I was one of the most outcome-driven athletes that you could find, before I had this kind of paradigm shift,” she says. “And it just wasn’t working for me anymore. I was having all kinds of anxiety, three quarters of a month. I was having trouble physically breathing, because I was having so much anxiety about how I’m going to play, how I’m going to do, what happened last game, all these different things.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
In early 2020, something snapped. “I was just like, so tired,” Kling remembers, “of having anxiety all the time, worrying about the next game. My body would get tight when I’d play, then I’d relax for a few days, and then it would build, build, build. It was like, 10 years of that.”
Through a friend, she got in touch with a performance coach named Jason Goldsmith, whose core philosophy is to teach athletes to focus on the things they can control and let go of the things they can’t. “[Whether] you win or lose, or if you play well, or statistically do well, all of those things, you know, are not something that’s controllable,” Goldsmith says.
Even the best players in the world miss tackles and hoof shots over the bar. As a defender, sometimes you can save the day, and other times you have to go one-on-one againstLynn Williams.“What is controllable,” Goldsmith says, “is, how do you feel when you are playing?”
One tool he uses with athletes is a biofeedback device called a FocusBand, a wearable EEG that connects to a smart phone and allows the user to directly monitor their brain activity.“The benefit of having something like that,” he explains, “that gives you direct feedback, [is that it] allows you to explore different meditation practices in a way that you can see, ‘oh, when I do this, when I focus on this, this is how it’s affecting my brainwave frequency. Or if I do this, this really doesn’t work.’”
In Taoism and Zen Buddhism, one goal of meditation is to enter a state of mushin, or “no-mindedness.” It’s a state of complete engagement in an activity—whether that activity is meditating or kicking a soccer ball—without thought or judgment.
“If you had the device on and you were thinking about how to play,” Goldsmith explains, “you’re no longer playing.”
That state of mind, sometimes called “flow,” is an indispensable toolfor athletes, or anyone doing a high-skill task that requires intense concentration.It also has a neural fingerprint that the FocusBand can pick up on. For Kling, Goldsmith sewed the device into a hat, so she could wear it throughout the day. Using the band as part of a daily mindfulness practice, she transformed her outlook.
“Sometimes we go to the grocery store, right,” she explains, “and we’re standing in lines waiting. But what are we waiting for? We’re waiting for the future.” The future, though—as we’ve already discussed—doesn’t exist. At some point, Kling realized, “I don’t need to wait. I can just be.”
That shift helped her reconceptualize the game of soccer. “When I first got [to Portland], it was all about outcomes. How do I make 100% passing, how do I create the most chances? How do I stop the most one-v-ones, all these different things. And I would just data myself to death.”
By shifting her focus away from outcomes, Kling says, “everything slowed down.” Instead of thinking about completing passes or chances, or winning the ball back in specific moments, “I just think about it in terms of space. How do I get my body and this ball into this area? Instead of seeing defenders running at me, or where my players are running, I more see everything at once.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
The excellence paradox works in reverse, too. Not worrying about the numbers hasenabled Kling to improve her numbers. So far this season, she has a 78.5% pass completion rate, about 5% more than she had in 2019, a 43.9% long pass completion rate—a 10% improvement—and is attempting about 57 passes per game, compared to 43 in 2019.
“For [Dōgen], each moment of practice encompasses enlightenment, and each moment of enlightenment encompasses practice. In other words, practice and enlightenment—process and goal—are inseparable. The circle of practice is complete even at the beginning. This circle of practice-enlightenment is renewed moment after moment.”
–Kazuaki Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds
Kling’s journey over the last three years parallels that of the Thorns as a team. “[In] ‘16 and ‘17, we were very, very focused on the process,” Mark Parsons says. What he means by “process” is a relentless focus on getting better as a group, according to an abstract vision of the kind of team they want to be, rather than numbers of wins and losses. Train well, work hard, strive for improvement, and the results will follow, the reasoning goes. “‘18, ‘19, I think we got—I got—distracted with the outcome,” he says.
It sounds a little absurd to say there was something wrong with a team’s approach in two seasons when they went to the league championship and the playoff semifinal, respectively, but within the team, something had soured. The Thorns want and expect to be the best, and with their resources, there’s little excuse not to be.
From the outside, nothing seemed particularly amiss during that time. You had to know what to look for: a player reporting late for uncertain reasons, a vague disjointedness and a whiff of frustration in the attack. The team’s culture issues came to a head at the 2019 semifinal at Chicago, when Caitlin Foord, Midge Purce, and Hayley Raso started on the bench. After the 1–0loss, AD Franch alluded to internal fracture, saying the team needed to “regroup, find our culture, and get back to who we are.”
Some of that was a personnel issue; too many players, regardless of quality, weren’t bought into Parsons’s vision for the team. The club cleaned house over the offseason and brought in the likes of Rocky Rodríguez, Sophia Smith, and Morgan Weaver. At least as important was that the coaching staff took a long look in the mirror and realized they’d strayed from their core values.
Effort is the first of those values. But that’s hardly unique, either when looking to Parsons teams of past years—if I had a nickel for every time I’d recorded him talking about “maximum effort,” I’d have, well, quite a few nickels—or when you think about the whole edifice of team sports, especially in this country.
What’s new for this version of the Thorns is the striking literalness with which they apply their stated values. You don’t have to speak with anyone on the team to know this; you can see it on the field. They want to improve at one specific style of play, so they use the same basic game plan every week, regardless of personnel.
Most teams, including the Portland of two or three years ago, line up different ways in different situations, moving to a back three or employing a different pressing scheme to fill in the gaps when certain players weren’t available. Now there is one plan, with clearly defined roles at every position, which every player on the roster knows like the back of their hand.
Photo by Nikita Taparia
The goal is to win. But they see winning as a long-term goal, not an immediate one. Winning this week is one thing. They want to win the league.
“If we live the rollercoaster of winning and losing and tying with the ball going in or the ball not going in,” Parsons says, “we’re just a team that defines ourselves by outcome. But medium- and long-term success isn’t decided by outcome. It’s about improvement.” Control the controllables, and the rest will fall into place.
Parsons and Kling both use the 2020 Challenge Cup as an illustration.
“We went into the COVID Cup in 2020 and came in last in the preliminary stages,” Kling says. “But that’s because we were so beholden to our mission, we were so beholden to the process, that we were not going to change what we were going to do just to get results. I know that really bothered a lot of people, but it didn’t bother us.”
“We all knew we were on a different journey,” Parsons says.
When Buddha was in Grdhrakuta mountain he turned a flower in his fingers and held it before his listeners. Every one was silent. Only Maha-Kashapa smiled at this revelation, although he tried to control the lines of his face.
Buddha said: “I have the eye of the true teaching, the heart of Nirvana, the true aspect of non-form, and the ineffable stride of Dharma. It is not expressed by words, but especially transmitted beyond teaching. This teaching I have given to Maha-Kashapa.
“I had to realize that life wasn’t fair,” Kling says.
Unfairness—along with pain, loss, and regret—are inevitable. What we can change is how we react.In Buddhism, the cause of suffering is not what happens to us, but the way we push back internally against it. You can be bitter forever, or you can learn to let go.
The idea of getting back to where she was—back to her 2015 form, back to the national team—took some time for Kling to let go of. “But,” she says now, “there’s no getting back to where I was, and why would I want to anyway? Why would I want to go back in the past when I could take all of that information and use it now, and be a totally different player, be a player that I want to be?”
Arguably, she’s better now than she was then. She’s having the club season of her career. More important, she’s found joy in the game again. As she said in a press conference during the 2021 Challenge Cup, “I’m literally having a fucking blast right now.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
“I’ll tell [friends and family] stories that happened in practice,” she says, “and they’re like, ‘do you ever practice? All I hear about is you laughing, all I hear about is you telling these crazy-ass stories!’ And I’m like, ‘yeah, well, we do that the entire practice. All I do is laugh and play hard, the whole practice.’ I love that, because to me, joy is one of the main drivers of me getting better. When I’m laughing and having fun with my friends, I know that I’m fully tuned in to exactly what we’re doing.”
She sees the pressure, the anxiety, the feelings of inadequacy she long struggled with in other elite athletes. It’s getting more common for athletes, many of them women—Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Christen Press—to pull out of competitions for mental and emotional injuries in addition to physical ones.
Those injuries are complex and often rooted in off-field trauma, but to the extent that competition itself exacerbates them, Kling says, “I personally feel like we’ve let these women down. We never taught them that competition should be joyful. We never taught them to be just content with exactly who [they] are.”
“All I want for them is to be able to step up onto the biggest stage of their lives, knowing that they have done everything that they can possibly do to get to that moment, and enjoy it.”
Thorns players pose with Nabisco workers. Photo by Margaret Seiler.
Workers at the Mondelez International bakery in Northeast Portland have been striking August 10 due to a contract dispute with their employer, which wants a contract that includes longer shifts, cuts to overtime pay, and higher health insurance premiums. Nabisco/Mondelez employees in Illinois, Georgia, Colorado, and Virginia soon also walked off the job, and the Portland workers have been joined on the picket line by a variety of other unions, including longshoremen, railroad workers, machinists, and painters.
Today, they added one more union to that list: the NWSL Players’ Association.
A group of Thorns players, including Emily Menges, Marissa Everett, Morgan Weaver, Madison Pogarch, Simone Charley, Bella Bixby, Christen Westphal, Abby Smith, Yazmeen Ryan, and Taylor Porter, picketed in solidarity with the bakery workers along NE Columbia Blvd, holding signs reading “solidarity” and “scabs go home,” and chanting slogans like “no justice, no treats!” and “no contract, no snacks, Portland has the bakers’ backs!”
Emily Menges takes a turn with the bullhorn. Photo by Margaret Seiler.
“I just think it’s important that we show up for other members of the community who are fighting the same fight that we’re currently fighting,” said Menges. “We know right from wrong, and this is wrong.”
The union is in talks with management in Baltimore today, their third meeting since May, but the workers’ grievances go back further than that. “The company for a number of years, has been doing everything they can to try to break the union,” said Mike Burlingham, vice president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) Local 364, which represents the workers. “They’re not coming in to negotiate. They’re coming in with their list of demands.”
Burlingham said the company has yet to make any official offers, and has instead tried to negotiate directly with workers, which is illegal in a unionized workplace. They also brought in scabs from out of town to keep the bakery running while the union members strike.
“The company’s proposal is, they want to set up a two-tier medical plan for us, to create divide within the union,” said Burlingham. Essentially, the proposed plan would mean newer employees would pay higher premiums. “That’s called eating our young, and we don’t do that. And the other thing is, they want to move our eight-hour shifts to 12-hour shifts and change the language of how we get paid overtime.”
“Greed is the problem here, with Mondelez,” said Victor Weekes, a retired worker who now acts as a union representative. “And respect. Mondelez don’t respect the people that work.”
BCTGM representative Victor Weekes talks to Thorns players. Photo by Margaret Seiler.
Professional soccer is a very different job from working a factory floor, but workers’ rights are workers’ rights. “I think that we can’t really look at ourselves as like a group of a group of workers that are going through anything new,” said Bixby. “I think that it’s on us to line ourselves up with other workers that are going through labor struggles as well.”
“The details and everything are different—we’re not fighting for pensions, we’re not fighting for that kind of stuff—but just the fair treatment of humans,” said Menges. The NWSLPA is also currently negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the league, but “for today,” she continued, “we are less focused on what we’re doing and more focused on what they’re trying to accomplish.”
The players’ presence on the picket line was not a Thorns-specific effort, but a gesture on behalf of the whole NWSLPA. “The PA’s been watching what’s been going on with these Nabisco workers pretty much all over the country,” she said. “It just so happened that one of the factories that went on strike is in Portland, and that was the only location that [players] plausibly could have gone to and supported them.”
“I think it’s important that we and other people in the community come and show support, just because I hope that it is taken seriously by their employer,” said Bixby. “I hope that ongoing support by a lot of different groups and a lot of different people helps them take it seriously.”
Seeing the Thorns stand in solidarity with the bakery workers “means the world to me,” said Burlingham. “Them showing up and showing their support is so meaningful to us. Players of that caliber, and the platform that they have and the attention that they can bring to this, it’s phenomenal.”
Striking Nabisco/Mondelez workers. Photo by Katelyn Best.
A number of the striking workers are Thorns fans, and several people giddily posed for photos with the players; one woman admitted to me she was too shy to ask for a photo. Weekes is a big Timbers fan, and his son has Thorns season tickets. If the Thorns are in the championship in November, he said with a grin, he’d be there.
All the Nabisco workers I spoke to agreed that spirits are high. “All the support we get,” said Chrysta Knutson, a packing shop steward with Local 364, “it gives me so much motivation and encouragement, and it just keeps my morale up.”
“It takes it takes a whole community, and in this case, an entire nation, because this is a nationwide strike,” said Burlingham. “It’s going to take an entire nation to stand up and say, what’s going on isn’t right… And until that time, boycott Nabisco, boycott Mondelez.”
Some reporting was contributed by Margaret Seiler.
The Thorns recorded their first ever win away against the Courage on Sunday. The game was touted as a “top of the table clash,” and Kelli Hubly said afterward that “rivalry between the Courage and the Thorns might be bigger than that against the Reign” because both teams have won multiple NWSL titles. Despite the 1-0 scoreline and the Thorns’s 2-0 loss in Cary earlier this year, Portland dictated the tempo from the beginning and dominated in shots, possession, and passing.
The Courage didn’t look as threatening as they have previously this season—they were unbeaten in their last seven games—and weren’t able to get many shots off. While this could be attributed to internal issues and player turnover on the team, the Thorns’s midfield have to get credit for effectively pressing and shutting down North Carolina’s box midfield.
In the above image (Thorns are moving left to right), it’s easy to see how much space the diamond midfield had. Angela Salem has the ball in the center of the pitch, and she has several easy passes to choose between. There are four Courage players within about a 10-yard radius, all of whom are behind the play. She chooses to play it forward to Crystal Dunn, who holds the ball and feeds it through for Sophia Smith to go 1v1 on goal.
Due to the fact that the Thorns can never seem to have all their forwards healthy at the same time, Christine Sinclair has transitioned into playing the No. 9 striker role since she returned from the Olympics. This switch allows Crystal Dunn to slide forward play the No. 10 center attacking mid, where she’s been more successful than she was in the deeper midfield positions in the diamond. Here, she is able to be a playmaker. With 50 touches and 76% passing accuracy, Dunn was an effective link between Sinclair and Smith up top and the midfield. The combination of those lines allowed the Thorns to outshoot the Courage 23-11.
In this image (Thorns are moving right to left), you can see Portland’s midfield holding their wider shape—as they did throughout the game—and consistently beating out the Courage’s. Lindsey Horan (bottom middle) plays the ball centrally, and Rocky Rodríguez is able to easily receive it. Due to the high press and wide shape, Rodríguez has several options to keep the ball moving around North Carolina.
The strength and consistency of the midfield against North Carolina is an example of the “Thorns mentality”—a phrase that players and coach Mark Parsons have repeated throughout the season. After the game, Parsons said they “want to be constantly improving and playing as a team because that will push [the team] towards [their] best.” He shouted out Dunn and Salem as two players who exemplified that mindset. As the last third of the seasons approaches, the Thorns will look to build on the consistency and success they have begun to expect.
Sophia Smith, tied for most goal on the Thorns with Charley, has been an example of the Thorns’ mentality. Staying with the Thorns all summer has been the ideal opportunity to get consistent minutes, and I don’t think I can say enough good things about Smith’s recent form. Against North Carolina, she had eight shots, a mere three fewer than the entire Courage team, with five on target. Probability says that if you shoot enough, one is bound to go in, but that statement cheapens Smith’s goal. Sinclair played a perfectly-weighted ball over the top, and Smith slipped between the two Courage center backs to go to goal. Seeing that Murphy was off her line, Smith knew she couldn’t take unnecessary touches, or Murphy would get the ball.
In this still, right before Smith struck the ball, Smith’s body is facing toward the left hand side of the goal. However, she doesn’t go there. Reading the keeper well, Smith strikes the ball with the outside of her right foot, sending it to the near post and catching Murphy off-balance.
Smith leads the entire league in shots, and while she isn’t consistent yet on her conversion rates, her ability to read the game and control her body allows her to score at crucial moments. Goals like the one in Sunday’s game are not an accident or a statistic probability; they are well-intentioned. As Smith continues to grow into the league, she will become even more lethal.
Also of note, it was good to see Tyler Lussi back on the field after so long out! Hopefully Simone Charley can come back soon because the Thorns’s front line will truly be frightening with all forwards fit.
Portland now heads off on international break, with the six players called up by their national teams joined by Mark Parsons as he officially begins coaching the Dutch National Team.
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