The Thorns have their first open-door match of 2022 on the books in the form of a 0–0 draw against OL “ol’ Reign” Reign. Rhian Wilkinson’s first game! The Thorns wore green! Let’s talk about it.
With Lindsey Horan gone, the Thorns have no choice but to come up with a completely new system. I’m not sure most fans are really prepared for what losing Horan means, which may be partially my fault and that of my media peers, since I don’t know that we’ve collectively emphasized enough how pivotal she was in the Mark Parsons era. So, to be clear: having Lindsey Horan is like having an extra player on the field. She’s a living cheat code. She was such a presence for the Thorns that she was almost easy to take for granted, like the sun.
It’s not that Portland never got results without her—the clashing NWSL and international schedules meant they had to do that plenty of times when she was on the roster—but I get the sense that the collective awareness of her importance was almost unconscious. Her contribution to the team wasn’t scoring worldies as much as it was that she’d show up and everything on the field would suddenly work better. The discourse when she was available wasn’t “Horan looked good today,” it was, “the Thorns looked good today.”
All this is preamble to the fact that Wilkinson is doing something very, very different with this team. The squad lined up like this:
In a word, the game was unspectacular. Whenever they lost possession, the Thorns would drop straight into a neat block; Morgan Weaver and Hannah Betfort would pester a center back or two to keep things moving, but the counterpress of the Parsons days is long gone. Natalia Kuikka and, to a lesser extent, Meghan Klingenberg, played pretty defensively, spending more time cutting off Reign attacks up the wing than looking to go forward themselves. Sam Coffey sat in a sharply defined No. 6 role, using none of the creativity she displayed at Penn State. Postgame, Rhian Wilkinson had this to say about using Coffey in that role:
Sam, even when I first brought her in, her calmness on the ball—she’s got ice in her veins. She’s been like that since day one, just like, “give me the ball.”… In that way, I really believe in midfield strength and connection. And I like her at the six, I think that she really comes alive, and she connects our team. We have a number of players that can do it. But I wanted to put her in the fire really, and see how she did. And I think she gave you all a glimpse of the talent that she has.
Thorns attacks were sparse, with a handful of chances in the first 15 minutes, then another handful in the last half hour. An early goal by Betfort—a header from close range off a corner by Weaver—was waved off for a foul. Most of the chances came from exploiting the spaces left open by Seattle’s press, with Kelli Hubly and Becky Sauerbrunn both connecting directly with the forwards a few times.
Betfort is listed as a defender, but Wilkinson says she sees her as a striker, and had this to say when comparing her with the other forwards on the roster:
Morgan and Sophia Smith are pure athletes. They’re incredible with their feet, technically, as well. Hannah has also got a lot of speed… the other two have a little bit more quickness, she has pure speed. And she’s very obviously a big strong woman who holds the ball out well for us. And she’s got clean feet for someone who is sort of one of those air quotes “old-school” kind of nines, as holding the ball up, she’s got really tidy feet. And I think she likes to play in a different way, where the others pull the line back, she often comes off the front.
The Thorns haven’t had a good old-fashioned shit-kicking nine in some time, and I enjoyed watching Betfort in that role.
In the midfield, Portland often looked outmatched. They were visibly frustrated with the Reign’s press, and Rocky Rodríguez and Yazmeen Ryan struggled to get past Quinn and Jess Fishlock. They’re both excellent creative players, but with a No. 6 who isn’t tasked with contributing much to the attack, no No. 10, and two forwards who tend to stay forward more than drop back to connect play, they couldn’t build much out of the center of the field.
But what we saw last night is not Portland’s best XI. Hina Sugita got about ten minutes in the No. 8 at the end of the match, about which all I have to say is: everybody new to the NWSL has to get that initiatory “why are they like this” moment out of the way. Smith came on in the 74th minute looking sharp as hell and immediately improved the connection between the midfield and the forward line. Also, Crystal Dunn will not be pregnant forever.
The defense was last night’s strong point. Hubly, Sauerbrunn, and Emily Menges are an outstanding central trio and contained just about everything the Reign threw at them. Whatever hiccups happen with the front five as the season gets rolling, Portland will be able to lean on that defensive foundation for results.
This article originally appeared in FourFourTwo USA. We are republishing it on the occasion of Diego Valeri’s departure from the Portland Timbers.
Nobody in Portland can quite believe they’ve got Diego Valeri.
When the Argentine came here in 2013, it was almost by accident. The Timbers had been eyeing then-U.S. men’s national team midfielder Mix Diskerud, an acquisition that was ultimately undone by the fine print in Diskerud’s potential contract. Valeri was plan B.
What nobody could have foreseen was what Valeri would become. After five years in the Rose City, Valeri is not only a player who defines the Portland Timbers on the field, but he’s a man who inspires more effusive emotion off it. The universal love Valeri’s won in Portland transcends any other athlete’s — or probably, for that matter, any other public figure’s.
That level of admiration goes much deeper than what he does on the field. That’s where it started, of course — Valeri is an elite enganche who orchestrates the Timbers’ attack and also happens to score lots of goals — but what has everyone in awe is he also happens to be an almost impossibly good guy. It seems like a violation of some basic law of the universe for a human being to be both as gifted with a ball and as humble, circumspect and generous as Valeri is.
The outer layer of Portland’s love affair with Valeri — the part that’s observable from outside the city — is his community service. The marquee example is his collaboration with Keith Palau, the Timbers supporter who was named “Community MVP” by the league’s MLS WORKS initiative in 2017.
Palau headed up a renovation of the visitation rooms at two foster care facilities — where foster kids get an hour each week to meet with their birth families — in Washington County, just west of Portland. “They tend to be cold and clinical,” Palau says of the facilities. “You know, it’s in a government building.”
Under the banner of 107ist (short for 107 Independent Supporters Trust, the organized, dues-paying core of the Timbers Army), Palau started raising money to redecorate the drab Hillsboro room in Timbers green and gold.
Sometime during the fundraising and planning stages, Palau unexpectedly heard from Valeri. “I want to help,” he said. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Palau didn’t take it seriously at first. “I thought, ‘that’s nice to say.’ ” But Valeri came back, and he, his wife, Florencia, and their young daughter, Connie, showed up to build furniture and paint.
“You expect them to show up for 30 minutes and pretend to paint a little bit, but no… They were here to work, and they stayed the whole time. They’ve always done more than you’d expect,” says Palau.
A Portland Trend: Everybody Loves Diego
Photo courtesy of Todd Diskin
It’s the same story with the other projects Valeri has gotten involved with. Once a year, the Timbers, Thorns and T2 teams, which all share the same ownership, organize Stand Together Week, during which the teams send players to work on community service projects. That’s how Valeri found out about the Children’s Book Bank, a Portland nonprofit that distributes free books to kids in underserved communities.
“He came and volunteered right after training,” remembers Todd Diskin, partnership manager at the Book Bank. “He was amazed that all this existed,” Diskin says, gesturing at the stacks of donated books that fill the nonprofit’s Northeast Portland space.
Diskin gave Valeri the lowdown on childhood literacy: how kids living in poverty get, on average, 25 hours with books between birth and first grade, compared with 1,000 or more hours in more affluent communities. How that discrepancy affects educational outcomes for those children before they even start school. How working to change it is an anti-poverty measure.
Valeri’s own account of his affinity for the Children’s Book Bank is almost startlingly personal, revealing the genuine empathy with which he approaches the world. “Some kids don’t have an atmosphere around them that’s ideal,” he says. “Books are a world where you can be involved with a reality very different than you are living in.”
The Argentinean playmaker spent the day cleaning donated books, but just as he did with the foster care visitation rooms, he didn’t simply show up for a photo opportunity. “He reached out to me not too long after that wanting to volunteer, to do more,” says Diskin.
He started bringing books Connie had outgrown, and at one point, all three Valeris came back for another book cleaning session, which Diskin opened up to Timbers Army members. Connie, now 8, held a book drive at the family’s apartment building.
A handful of other causes in the Portland area have captured Valeri’s interest. One is Operation Pitch Invasion, which restores and builds soccer fields and futsal courts in underprivileged neighborhoods. Valeri is often seen at OPI court openings, and recently bought a piece at Art Without Pity, an art show benefiting the nonprofit.
He’s also worked with the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, which organizes soccer clubs and clinics for the youth it serves. One day, he showed up to a futsal training to meet some of those youth.
Photo courtesy of Julie Roberts
There’s more he doesn’t talk about, not wanting it to look like he’s out for publicity; it’s common knowledge among Timbers Army regulars that much of Valeri’s work in the community isn’t publicized at all.
Ask him about why he’s gotten involved in these causes and Valeri deflects. Much of it, he says, he gets wind of through Florencia, who he says is “behind everything” (he rarely refers to himself at all, instead defaulting to “we,” by which he means himself and his wife). He’s much happier talking about people like Palau and Diskin than about his own involvement, which he plays down as perfectly normal. “It’s the way I want to live,” he says. “I’ve always lived like that… We’re all responsible for the place we live.”
For a pro team’s star player to be this embedded in his community isn’t normal, of course. But the fact that he sees it that way is an important part of why Valeri is so universally beloved here. To really understand the depth of the love affair between Valeri and this city, you have to understand two things: the soccer community in Portland, and where Valeri himself comes from.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the “authenticity” of the gameday atmosphere at Providence Park: the elaborate tifo, the smoke, the ritualized setlist of never-ending chants What’s not as well understood outside Portland is that the whole phenomenon is a legitimately grassroots endeavor — and that it has a reach that goes well beyond the stadium.
There’s history here, dating back to the NASL Timbers of the 1970s. The modern-day Timbers Army started with the resurrected USL team; back then the supporters group was “25 people banging on pickle buckets,” as Diskin puts it (he was there). In the mid-2000s, when the campaign to get the Timbers into MLS started, it wasn’t a corporate ownership group but members of the Army, who often wound up at City Council meetings, lobbying to bring the league to Portland, hashing out bureaucratic details with reluctant council members.
Today, there are two 501(c)(3) organizations affiliated with the Army: OPI and the Gisele Currier Scholarship Fund, which raises money for local kids who otherwise couldn’t afford to play club soccer.
Mirroring Valeri’s attitude, most people take it as a given. “There happened to be a lot of civic-minded people involved, people who cared about the community,” 107ist board member Sherrilynn Rawlson says. “It seemed like a natural development.”
Start asking around, and you quickly realize the Timbers Army is a huge extended family. Talk to Rawlson, who stands in section 116, and she’ll ask if you know Michelle, in section 103. Michelle will ask if you know Darren, the drummer. Darren, naturally, is friends with Frank, who bangs one of the big drums that are the Army’s beating heart.
Everybody says to talk to Frank.
Franklin Oteiza is a Chilean immigrant who fell in love with the Timbers back in 2003, in the club’s USL days. He was Valeri’s first introduction to this strange fiefdom, serving as a spiritual guide when the Argentine arrived in Portland.
To hear Oteiza tell it, Valeri’s arrival in the Rose City was spun by the fates. He knew about Valeri’s exploits at his boyhood club, Atletico Lanus — how, in 2007, the then-20-year-old helped his club win its first-ever Apertura title, the same year the squad had gotten a hard-fought road draw against league giant Boca Juniors. He remembered commentators hailing Valeri as the next big thing when he went to Porto on loan in 2009.
“I knew if this guy signed, he was going to be the greatest Timber ever in the history of the club,” Oteiza says with the certainty of a man who’s lived and breathed this game his whole life. “I’m talking about a completely different level, something that’s just not common in MLS.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
Oteiza felt a kinship with Valeri even when his acquisition by the Timbers was still a rumor. The footballing cultures of Chile and Argentina have a lot of shared DNA, and when Valeri signed with the Timbers, Oteiza couldn’t get over the feeling that he needed to talk to him, to tell him about his adopted home, one South American expat to another.
“It was really important for me to tell this guy we’re for real,” he remembers. “That here we chant and clap and sing for victory for 90-plus minutes… This is it, this is just like Argentina, man. Just like Chile. We sing with all this crazy power, and we’re not going to stop.”
One day shortly after Valeri’s arrival, the drum corps was unloading at the stadium. “As I’m parking, I’m telling my buddy, I need to talk to Diego, I need to talk to Diego,” Oteiza said. As if on cue, Valeri emerged from one of the park’s arched gateways. “Right there in front of me, man.” Valeri, who was still learning English, was relieved to meet somebody who sounded like he came from back home.
“He told me the story about the Timbers, and I was shocked,” says Valeri. “He told me about the history, about the Army, the way they are organized, the way they support the team, they support the city. It was amazing. I didn’t expect that history.”
The grassroots nature of the Army reminded Valeri of the way football works in Argentina, where clubs tend to be supporter-owned. “You don’t find that in different places around the world, in the big clubs,” he says.
Where Valeri and Oteiza come from, intensity and passion often go hand-in-hand with violence and organized crime. “Those were the times, unfortunately, when a lot of crazy stuff was happening in Argentina,” says Oteiza. “People getting killed at the stadiums.”
That’s something Valeri is all too familiar with. “Every team in my country has or [has] had violent experiences,” he says.
By Valeri’s later years at Lanus, Florencia had stopped bringing Connie to matches, fearing for her safety. The family knew they had to get out of Argentina when they were robbed at gunpoint in 2012.
For men living in poverty where Valeri comes from, football “is the only way we have,” Oteiza says, “to release all this incredible frustration and anger and pain.” He recalls being shocked, at his first Timbers game, that people drank beer in the stadium without fights erupting.
Around the same time Valeri arrived in Portland, the Timbers Army, which produces its own line of merchandise, came out with a new t-shirt with a fitting slogan: “Welcome to Paradise.”
It didn’t take long for Valeri to settle in on the pitch. He scored 10 MLS goals in 2013, and it was in that first year that he first kissed the Timbers crest on his shirt after scoring, a gesture that makes Oteiza’s voice shake when he talks about it. In 2015, after spending much of the season recovering from a torn ACL, Valeri took 27 seconds to notch the Timbers’ first goal in the championship match against Columbus—the fastest in MLS Cup history.
By then, Valeri had adopted Portland as his off-the-pitch home in earnest. “When my daughter started to settle down and have a normal life right as a kid,” he says, “there was a moment where I [thought] that Portland is my home.”
Connie, who was four when the Valeris arrived, is a Portland kid through and through. She plays for a youth club at Rose City Futsal and follows the Thorns religiously.
She got her dad into the team, too. Despite growing up with Lanus, Valeri says the Thorns are the first club he’s had the chance to truly support; he rarely attended matches in person as a kid, saying, “our economic situation wasn’t the best.”
It was Connie — who’s more impressed with Tobin Heath’s skills than her dad’s — who got him in the door, but Diego soon became a supporter in his own right. Like his community service work, his support for the Thorns isn’t some occasional token gesture.
“It’s great atmosphere and it’s a great team,” he says. That, too, reminds him of the football culture in Argentina. “You’re waiting for the weekend to be at the stadium to support your team.”
To say Valeri has embraced Portland as his home doesn’t quite capture the intimacy of the relationship he has with this community. The feeling that he belongs to the city is pervasive, and Oteiza isn’t the only Timbers Army regular he’s struck up a friendship with.
Photo courtesy of Thundercats FC
After a match one day in 2016, Valeri spotted a rail banner with the words “Valeri’s Club” written in an arc across the top. Intrigued, the Valeris asked who painted the banner. That’s when the family got to know the Thundercats.
The Thundercats, a co-ed futsal team who play at the same Northeast Portland facility as Connie, started out as an open-invite squad. “If you want to learn how to play,” says Michelle DeFord, “that’s what we can do.”
Just like Diskin and Palau, the Thundercats didn’t quite believe it the first time Valeri said he wanted to play with them. “We were like, ‘We can’t break Diego Valeri,’ ” remembers DeFord, who painted the banner. “He can come when we do open play.”
Valeri showed up and kicked a ball around with the adult team and a gaggle of kids. But he wanted to play. Eventually, a week came around when the team was short on subs, and Valeri came through, along with Shade Pratt, who played for the Thorns at the time. Nobody remembers the score, but the league’s mercy rule, which normally kicks in when one team has a seven-goal lead, went ignored.
“You know in The Sandlot, when Benny’s like, ‘put your glove in the air’?” says Jared Grawrock, asked what it was like to play with Valeri. “That’s exactly what it is. You make a run and the ball will get there… I’m still in awe. None of that shine or coolness has gone away.”
That’s the general feeling around the city. Almost everybody, sooner or later, gets emotional talking about him. He still seems too good to be true.
It’s hard to gauge Valeri’s own awareness of his stature here. He’s glad to spread joy from the field, but he recognizes that what he does for a living, ultimately, is just a game. “After the game is done,” he says, “and after you retire, you’re a simple guy. You’re just one more.”
Asked why he, a guy who has three caps for Argentina and is consistently lauded as one of the best players in MLS, wanted to spend a Wednesday night playing in an adult rec league, he pauses, looking faintly bemused.
“Because I love to play,” he answers, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “And they’re my friends.”
Note: this article contains transphobic and racist social media posts, including a manipulated photo showing a person in blackface, and discusses racist, transphobic, and anti-semitic right-wing rhetoric and violence.
You’ve heard, I’m sure, that the Portland Thorns—the organization currently led by two very nice Canadian women, one of whom said in her introduction to the press that she wanted to create “the most connected, purpose-driven club in the world”—chose a player named Sydny Nasello out of the University of South Florida in this year’s college draft. I imagine you’ve also seen the social media activity fans dug up the instant her name was called. In case you haven’t, here are some screenshots:
I don’t know Nasello. I don’t know, when it comes down to it, exactly why she chose to retweet these things, nor do I know if her views have changed since the most recent one above, from November 7, 2020. But I have spent enough time on the internet to know that retweeting usually serves the purpose of amplifying a message that a user agrees with, and I am aware enough of our current political moment to know that these particular posts suggest a specific worldview. Everything I am about to say is based on that information.
Working with the assumption that retweets mean endorsement, let’s consider the three above one at a time.
The first one indicates that the retweeter denies the reality of trans identity. This is a belief so obviously harmful that it requires no further explanation.
The second one is a little harder to parse, but here I feel that a bare retweet, with no added comment, implies the retweeter has a positive view of the little boy raising money to build a 30-foot wall on our southern border.
The last one, by the former president’s greasy-haired son, no less, alludes to the widespread pro-racial justice, anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, equating anger over centuries of well-documented state-sanctioned violence against Black people with anger over an election that some people believe, without evidence, was stolen. It also alludes to baseless conservative claims that racial justice protesters turned many cities—Portland included—into smoking, lawless ruins ruled by roving antifa gangs.
If our assumption that the retweeter agrees with these things is correct, her views are firmly in line with those of the archetypal Trump voter. Not the reluctant fiscal conservative, not the ordinary rich person who doesn’t want to pay higher taxes; the flag-waving, grievance-driven fanatic.
These tweets reflect a worldview basically reducible to a single principle: no person or group of people has an inherent right to exist, much less the right to be treated with dignity and respect, to express themselves, to participate in the political process, to have complete bodily autonomy, to move freely, or to form associations with others as they choose to do so.
This view denies trans people the legitimacy of their lived and felt reality, denies people uprooted by conflict the right to seek asylum, and denies people living in extreme poverty the right to be treated like human beings at all. To people whose views are in line with these tweets, those rights are only accorded to those with the means to seize them, whether by physical, economic, or political power. To the extent that any person or group of people cannot do so, even (or perhaps especially) if that inability is caused by longstanding institutionalized oppression, this is taken as evidence of inherent inferiority and unworthiness not just of those rights, but ultimately of continuing to live.
Conveniently, there’s a word for this world view: fascism.
Again, it’s impossible to ascribe, with absolute certainty, a set of beliefs to someone you’ve never met, but everything I know about the world leads me to believe that someone who would amplify these messages on their personal social media probably thinks this way, broadly speaking.
A couple hours after she was drafted, Nasello tweeted a Notes app statement containing the kind of non-apology apology we expect from public figures who have been caught expressing views they still wholeheartedly embrace but fear will get them “canceled”:
Nasello can play coy all she wants. She can come up to the teacher’s desk and say “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” with her eyes shyly lowered while she fidgets her hands behind her back. But we all know, and I imagine she knows, that she’s dodging the real issue. The problem is not that she might, at some time, have made some abstract group of people feel “not supported.” The problem is that she has deliberately and repeatedly indicated that she believes some groups of people are inherently less valuable than others. If she does not hold that belief, I don’t know why she would have retweeted Charlie Kirk saying as much. If she’s changed her mind since then, surely she could have said so specifically in her statement.
There are also two Twitter “likes” by Nasello’s account that I want to highlight:
These stand out to me not because they express particularly more extreme or dangerous views than the three retweets I included above, but because of their tone. To me—again, because I have spent a fair amount of time on the internet and can recognize alt-right rhetoric—they add a particular hard edge to the basic outline illustrated by the retweets discussed above.
They are noteworthy because they exemplify what is perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the radical right as it currently exists in America: the way that to the extreme right’s adherents, all of this, the casual cruelty and dehumanization and undermining of democratic norms, is a big fucking joke. The modern right was birthed on the internet, by millions of people memeing about things like the Holocaust, trying to outdo one another in edginess, screaming racial slurs on Xbox Live, all for the lulz at first, until at some point the joke became, “let’s stage a torchlight march where we chant ‘Jews will not replace us,'” and the punchline had a body count.
Once again, I do not know Nasello’s intention here, but I think it’s fair to say that the act of clicking what’s called the “like” button usually indicates agreement or appreciation. So: in that light, let’s consider the two tweets above.
I will confess that I’m not sure what the joke is supposed to be in the first one. In part, it seems it’s simply intended to be shocking for the sake of being shocking. One point being made is that anyone (“libs”) who would feel belittled or insulted (“offended” or “triggered”) by blackface is clearly an idiot and therefore that blackface is inherently funny; all the more funny to portray one of the country’s best-known left-wing figures, a woman who presumably understands why blackface is harmful to Black people, wearing it.
There’s some second layer here, too. At the end of 2020, LeBron James’s longtime contract with Coca-Cola ran out, which I assume is the reference being made. I suppose we’re intended to make some connection between Black people (because James is Black, get it?) and Coke, something about how brands have given in to the Woke Mob and will now only endorse people of color. I think? If I’m right about that connection, there’s an added element about James being not just a very rich and famous Black man, but one who is fairly outspoken about racism, which racists do not like.
The joke is nonsensical, as far as I can tell, but in short, it mocks 1) the idea that racism is bad, 2) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinking that racism is bad, and 3) corporations wanting to appear not to be racist.
The second tweet isn’t a joke so much as an exemplification of the way the online right expresses approval of its heroes, in slangy terms that gesture toward irony but, as with everything in this world, are anything but. Beating an antifa protester with a stick is termed “based,” while here Trump’s ultranationalist chest-thumping amid a deadly pandemic his administration exacerbated is “hard.” He’s just another memelord, in this view. Calling migrants rapists and criminals is a meme, sexual assault is a meme, racist violence is a meme.
That the views expressed in the posts I’ve included here reflect the outlook of a larger and larger majority of one of the two mainstream political parties in this country is irrelevant to the fact that this outlook is straightforward, by-the-book fascism. This is the single most vile and dangerous ideology that human beings have ever invented, and it’s here right now, and we cannot pretend that we don’t see it.
For the third time, let me reiterate that I don’t know Nasello, so to some degree, all this is conjecture. I think, however, that it’s quite reasonable, as conjecture goes.
And I want to be abundantly clear about the appropriate answer to a person who espouses this kind of extreme right ideology. There is no room for tolerance when it comes to fascism. Fascism is about power, and its proponents do not deal in good-faith dialogue and debate. This set of views is so dangerous not only because it involves wishing harm on certain groups of people; the additional danger is that it seeks to perpetrate that harm through the destruction of the democratic process and anyone who dissents. If we let ourselves be drawn into a facetious discussion about the legitimacy of these views, pretending that somewhere between “we should overthrow the government and install a white nationalist autocracy” and “all human beings are inherently valuable” lies a reasonable middle ground, we’ve already lost.
The Thorns say they didn’t know about all this before drafting Nasello. Fine; I have no reason not to believe them. That’s a serious unforced error, but fortunately it has a simple solution: the Thorns must release Nasello’s rights. An organization cannot seriously claim to respect the rights of women, Black and brown people, and the LGBT+ community while allowing someone with these views onto its payroll. In the Rose City, there is no football for fascists.
I tried to write about Mark Parsons, who recently completed his sixth and final season as the coach of the Portland Thorns. It didn’t work. Instead I just thought about the passage of time and my experience of it. That’s what this is:
Aniccā (Impermanence)
I was 16 the first time I felt old. I was in the hall at South Eugene High School and something involving a slightly younger person happened—I have completely forgotten what—but I remember with crystalline clarity that suddenly I felt like this:
It’s absurd to feel old at 16, or perhaps any of the ages that I have been thus far. But the essence of feeling old has nothing to do with objective age. It’s about being old-er. Thus, it is possible to feel old at almost any age. One of the main ways to feel old is what I felt in the hallway that day: realizing that you know things that younger people do not.
Sometimes you look at a younger person and think, “How could you care so much about [thing]?” Sometimes you look at them and think, “Good lord, don’t do that.” Sometimes, a little cruelly, it’s “Just wait until [bad thing happens].”
The other face of feeling old (aside from mysterious bodily pain, which I would not experience until some years after the hallway incident) is the sense that the world and the people in it have shifted under your feet. You drive by a house you used to live in and it’s been painted and had all the leaky windows replaced, or it’s not a house at all anymore, it’s a condo. You go to a Thorns game and it hits you—feeling old always hits you all at once, never incrementally—that there are only two players on the roster who were there when you started your foolish little hobby of writing about them whether anybody wanted you to or not.
This is all a roundabout way of saying: things change. The “they knocked my old house down” feeling and the “what do you kids know” feeling are two sides of the same coin. Something goes away, something else gets renewed. Everything dies, and the wellspring of youth is infinite. That’s all you can count on.
Photo by Kris Lattimore
Anattā (Not-self)
Where is the essence of a soccer team to be found? Is it in the players? The stadium? The manager? The ownership? The fans? Clearly not: almost all of those things have changed for the Thorns over the last six years. If they are all changeable, how can we say that a club that exists today also existed nine years ago? 20? 100?
During the pandemic, I aged a good 10 years. That was the effect of more or less sitting in my house doing absolutely fuck all for something like 15 months. What I mean is that the experience was ultimately good for me.
For instance, one night last spring I realized that I’d been waking up with a vague fear tickling at the corners of my mind every day for months. Upon reflection, I realized that the fear was the fear of death, that it was probably time to deal with that fear head on, and further, that nothing in my life had given me the tools to do so. I decided to look for God.
In that hallway at South Eugene High School, 15 years ago (15 normal Earth years, not 15 pandemic years), I’d never have believed I would one day write that sentence. But I’m not that old-feeling 16-year-old anymore. You sit around long enough, becoming incrementally more Patty-and-Selma-like all the time, and eventually you might realize that the question—the question, the only question, the burning, impossible question—isn’t “does God exist,” or “what am I supposed to do while I’m here,” but “why is there something instead of nothing?” The answer to the question, which is unanswerable, is the thing we call “God.” That is what I have come to think, anyway.
I bring this up because 1) becoming curious about the nature of the universe was what led me, in a roundabout way, to the title and structure of this article, and 2) to illustrate that things will happen to you that you don’t expect. You will change in ways that might not make sense. This is both wonderful and terrifying: wonderful because it means that you are never stuck one way; terrifying because it also means that there’s no “you” to speak of, really. Not one that persists, or is under your control.
The me I was in 2007 is no more or less me than the one I was when I started to think about death last spring. The only one that exists at all is the one typing these words right now.
The Portland Thorns, too, are only ever exactly as they are in a given moment. There’s no higher level of abstraction. At one moment in 2016, they were this:
Once earlier this year, they were this:
Another time, they were this:
Photo by Matthew Wolfe
So right at this moment, what are the Portland Thorns? Where can I go to see them?
Inevitably, we have to conclude that they do not exist. We use their name as a semantic convenience, but it does not point to any continuous thing. The Thorns are not Mark Parsons, AD Franch, Midge Purce, or “Iko Iko”. Nor are they Sophia Smith, a big red drum, Gavin Wilkinson, Rhian Wilkinson, or even Christine Sinclair. They are not a pressing team or a counterattacking team. They are not defensively sound, nor do they have trouble finishing. They are simply there, or not.
Photo by Matthew Wolfe
Duḥkha (Suffering)
The supply of suffering is infinite. It is the sting of a playoff loss, the sunburn one gets at an afternoon game in August. It is when Tobin Heath’s rights get snapped up in an expansion draft for no good reason.
We cannot stop these things from happening (please do wear sunscreen). Pain will happen. Loss will happen. Suffering is adjacent, but different: its root is in clinging. We cling to players and coaches, clearly. We cling to the idea of winning everything, to the high of a championship, to the moment when a player is one on one with the keeper and is surely, surely going to score. There is nothing here (see above). It’s like trying to scoop up sand with a sieve. Once we understand this, we can begin to get free.
It is only in letting go that we can fully experience anything. If we relinquish expectation, we start to feel that the very fact of the game is a miracle. The weight and texture of the ball, the sun and the rain, the existence of feet. We see that the moment a player is one on one with the keeper is a spark of magic, regardless of what happens next (what happens next doesn’t exist, until it does). The goal itself is an unalloyed joy, if we let it stand by itself.
Even the pain of loss, if we look at it right, is a thing to experience, to open ourselves up to. It doesn’t last. Or you might feel it today, but not tomorrow, and then again the next day. It is not us.
In this way, nothing is ever old. Everything is as new as the moment when we take it in. The world is remade in each moment, and so are we. May we always remember this. May we never feel old.
The end of this Thorns season—only the second-weirdest NWSL season because 2020 happened—came with a shrug last night, somehow sudden despite being the latest-ever closing weekend in the league’s nine-year history. If we had visions of the Thorns thundering down the stretch in Mark Parsons’s last year in Portland, growing in power until they peaked in the playoffs and won the last and biggest trophy left to win, well. They could still peak in the playoffs. They could certainly still win the big trophy. But things haven’t gone quite like that.
The season ender was, above all, weird. I’d been expecting a win; North Carolina have not been good (and weren’t good last night), and the possibility of the first decent home crowd in more than two months seemed to bode well, motivation-wise. Instead, the Thorns did more of their weird thing that they do, their frustrating thing where they look like the dominant side for most of the game, string together some beautiful attacking sequences, look like they generally have the right idea, and never manage to put the ball in the back of the net.
With that said, let’s look at how the Thorns approached NC. This team talks a lot about how they deploy the same formation against every opponent, but they do make smaller-scale tweaks against specific teams. Against the Courage last night, rather than pressing one forward and having the other available to combine or receive a through pass if the first forward won the ball, they used the non-pressing forward to mark NC’s strong-side outside back.
They also pressed the back line less than they generally do, period. Here’s a shot of the Courage defense getting lots of time on the ball, with the Thorns’ attackers gently encouraging them to keep to one side of the field but otherwise not interfering. Sophia Smith is loosely marking NC left back Carson Pickett in the bottom left of the image.
At first, this seems almost backwards. Generally speaking, offenses try to make their shape as big as possible, while a team in its defensive phase tries to shrink the available space. But here, as Mark Parsons explained after the game, the Thorns wanted to let the Courage spread out like this. “When their backline has time on the ball,” he said, “they get bigger, and when you win it, you have a lot of space to exploit, which you saw, I think, multiple times through the first half.”
As you can see in the screenshot above, both Pickett and Merritt Mathias, the NC right back, are pushed well up the field. Abby Erceg is taking her time on the ball, scanning the field for a pass. Eventually, she passed to Denise O’Sullivan in the center of the field, who was immediately forced to go back to Erceg under aggressive pressure from Angela Salem, bringing us to the moment below:
Here the Thorns have succeeded in confining Erceg to a little pocket on the left flank. She can’t pass to Pickett, who Smith is still covering. She could go back to O’Sullivan, but Salem is ready to pounce if she does so. She can either hit one over the top toward Jessica McDonald and Lynn Williams, or she can try to find a pass through the Thorns’ midfield line to Debinha, who’s hovering behind Yazmeen Ryan in this shot.
Ultimately, she chooses the second option, which brings us to the defensive advantage of Portland dropping one forward at a time back to mark an attacking fullback. “You look at McDonald and Williams, their biggest threat is in behind,” Parsons said. Marking one outside back with a forward lets all four defenders stay home, narrowing the channels Williams and McDonald have to get in behind.
There’s a second piece, too: “We wanted to make sure that that space wasn’t there, but they get there through their 10s.” Keeping four defenders home frees up one of them to step to the Courage No. 10s, Debinha and Amy Rodriguez, which is exactly what happened here. As soon as Erceg passed to Debinha, Kelli Hubly was in motion, springing forward to whack the ball into outer space.
Ideally, instead of a whack, they’d make a long pass into all that space created by the Thorns’ permissive pressing strategy, and Morgan Weaver or Christine Sinclair would burst through and have an easy chance on goal. That almost happened a few times, but, as Parsons said, the team ultimately “didn’t quite take advantage of those counter attacks.”
But: having already clinched the Supporters Shield, the Thorns didn’t need to win this game, which was perhaps what dictated the vibe as the game went on. After a handful of good chances in the first half, including some beautiful combinations between Portland’s attacking corps, the second half was a bit of a slog. The Thorns only posted five shots (compared to 14 in the first half), with just one on goal.
The Courage, meanwhile, were fighting to avoid elimination from the playoffs and played increasingly desperate as time marched on. It was a strange sight. Much of the individual brilliance the Courage have always had was still there, with Debinha and A-Rod both making some eye-popping, if useless, solo plays, but the machine broke down a long time ago. These days, we’re all just trying to get by.
As for the Thorns’ fate in the weeks to come: they get a bye in the first round of the playoffs, courtesy of the Shield. In the semifinal, they’ll play the winner of next weekend’s Chicago-Gotham matchup. I think it’s likely they beat either of those teams and make it to the final, but after that, it’s anyone’s game.
I genuinely don’t know what to make of Portland’s form right now. Last night after the whistle, the defense gathered for a group hug, celebrating their 13th regular-season shutout, which is a new league record. The team was all smiles as they climbed the stairs to greet the fans and learn the winner of the Riveters Player of the Year, who—very deservedly—was Angela Salem.
They’re a good soccer team, broadly speaking. The best in the league, you might argue! It seems cruel at this point, after everything they’ve been through, to pick nits about the defense getting a little lucky a few times last night, or to ask whether the team is having a scoring issue. Parsons spoke about the need to keep improving heading into the semifinal, and he’s right. Hopefully Lindsey Horan, Crystal Dunn, and Rocky Rodríguez are all fully healthy by then, too, which will help.
As ever, the emphasis postgame was on togetherness. The last two years have been brutal for everyone in this league, and it’s hard not to assume that the last month in particular derailed the Thorns’ hoped-for late-season progression curve. But pain can lead to growth, too, and if the team is as happy to have made it this far as they seem to be, maybe that’s enough.
“This is a special group,” Kling said postgame. “It’s a real family. We’ve been through a lot this year—hard times—whether it’s health, COVID, the abuse scandals that have happened, and I think we’ve used all of these things to come together and to talk about it and to get stronger.”
Last night the Thorns played soccer against the Houston Dash in the heaviest, most surreal context I’ve ever experienced while reporting on the sport.
As for the game: Portland lost 2–3, thanks in part to a Dash penalty scored off a harsh handball call against Becky Sauerbrunn. After Kristie Mewis notched Houston’s second goal in the 23rd minute, the Thorns seemed to wake up and kick their attack into gear. With Houston’s press collapsing two and three players toward the ball, Portland had ample space to work with and had success both from wide areas and stretching the Dash back line enough to find through passes. Christine Sinclair had a cracking finish, Sophia Smith nutmegged Jane Campbell for her goal, and for a while, things hummed along almost shockingly well. Portland dominated statistically, beating Houston in shots by more than double and shots on goal by nearly double.
But as one of my group chats pointed out last night, there’s perhaps no better sign that a team is struggling to focus than when they keep conceding. Refereeing complaints aside, communication got jumbled, marks were lost, and the Thorns let in goals they normally wouldn’t.
I can’t express how strange it felt to be sitting in the press box as the stadium emptied out, players hugging and commiserating on the field below, this thick heaviness in the air, as Stevie Wonder and Lizzo blared on the PA.
The players and the fans had each staged their own protests during the game; players from both teams, like the teams in the night’s previous two games had done, gathered in the center circle in the sixth minute, commemorating the six years that Mana Shim and Sinead Farrelly had to carry on in silence. For their part, the Riveters set off red and black smoke in the 24th minute, representing Farrelly and Shim’s numbers when they played for the Thorns—Farrelly wore #24, and Shim wore #6 (2 + 4).
Now here we were, processing, the players doing so under the harsh glare of the stadium lights, as the usual rhythm of a game day wound to a close.
Mark Parsons and Meghan Klingenberg spoke to the media after the game. I briefly tried to be reflective about last night and failed, so I’m going to offer some of their reflections instead.
Parsons on the responsibilities coaches have toward their players:
“You sign up to be a coach, and the first thing on the list is to be able to protect people, the health and safety and well being of people, players, but also as a head coach, you’re responsible for staff. It’s the first commitment you make, and it’s the simplest one to keep, and I’m so yeah, I’m so sorry, and sad that, that hasn’t been met, and players have suffered. How we got here, it’s really, really, really tough to think about how we got here. And we have to be honest in reflection and learning, but we have to make sure—and I think everyone keeps saying we—everyone in any position of leadership has to work to make sure that players are safe. That we have relentless policies and protocols in place to make sure that [we, who are] given this honor and and special privilege being around some of the best professionals, the best leaders, the best women are the right people. We absolutely have failed there… This is this is just embarrassingly heartbreaking.”
Klingenberg on the need to shift power into the players’ hands:
“This has been a really dark and heavy week, for everyone in the league, fans, players, coaching staff. It’s just been a lot. I think with that type of heaviness comes the realization that things need to change. And we’ve been doing a lot of grieving for our fellow players. We’ve been doing a lot of pathfinding, we’ve been doing a lot of, having big discussions about where this league should go, and how it should look. The one thing that keeps coming back to me and to us over and over and over again, is that without any say in the league, without any power, and without the financial resources to protect ourselves, and this will continue happening. So to me, there needs to be big structural changes within the league to protect these players. Because we’re vulnerable without a voice, we’re vulnerable without the financial means to protect ourselves, and that is something that cannot continue.”
Klingenberg on the emotions of the last week:
“I feel sad. I feel angry. I think what I feel depends on what time of the day it is. I feel a little bit of guilt.
Because, you know, I never want there to be any silent bystander in this league. And not because I think that people are bad or want bad things to happen to other players. I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s just that the players felt scared, and there’s no way to get out of a bad situation. These coaches get passed around, and so even if you speak up, it doesn’t feel like you’ll be protected. I think a lot of that goes back to the WPS and magicJack [where Klingenberg played as a WPS rookie]. It’s been really hard, because I know, I was on a team where things weren’t right, on a lot of levels, but there was only one person that ever spoke out about it, and that’s Ella Masar. And I think that we need to have a type of reckoning there too, because we need to protect each other, and we need to stand up for each other.
But it’s scary. It’s scary when you think that your career’s on the line and your dreams could be dashed. So I never want to put this on players, ever. I don’t think it’s on them. So yeah, I’m feeling a wide range of emotions. I also feel a bit of joy, that things are starting to change, and there’s discussion. And maybe we can see a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of competing feelings.”
Klingenberg on finding joy amid the darkness:
“For us, as players, a lot of times when things are hard outside of the game, we use the game as his place where we can immerse ourselves. And we can just be Megan on a pitch. But that’s been really hard to do this week. Because, as you know, what’s been happening is in our faces all the time, outside of the game, inside the game, so tonight, when I was hyping the team up, I told them that I wanted them to play— My greatest hope for them today was that they played like they were kids again, and to remember what it felt like when you were on the schoolyard or in the streets or in your backyard, and play with that type of passion and joy. I think that, you know, even if the result didn’t come out the way that we want it, I could still feel that joy from a lot of players, and I think we did a lot of really good stuff. So I just want to keep that going for the team because you know, they deserve it.”
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 fell 1–2 to their rivals from the north on Sunday. It was an exciting game that may be remembered as the moment the Reign completed their transformation into the superteam they’ve looked like on paper since the arrivals of Dzsenifer Maroszán, Rose Lavelle, and Eugenie Le Sommer.
Back under our old friend Laura Harvey and playing for the first time ever at the Seahawks’s Lumen Field, the Reign employed a clever game plan that both maximized their strengths and capitalized on the weaknesses in Portland’s setup.
Let’s take a look at the Reign’s first goal, which exemplifies both sides of that equation. In the screenshot below, Portland has just won possession off a Reign goal kick, and Maroszán is chasing Lindsey Horan, limiting her passing options:
Horan’s options on the left side of the field are cut off; most players would also see the passing lane to Rocky Rodríguez, in the center circle, as being blocked by Rose Lavelle, leaving Christen Westphal on the right as the only option. She’s wide open, too! But whether it’s because Horan isn’t at 100% mentally—she hasn’t looked like she’s quite clicked back into place with the team in the last couple games—or because she’s Lindsey Horan and has completed this pass plenty of times, she opts for Rodríguez. Lavelle scoops up the pass, Maroszán and Jess Fishlock close in, and Fishlock finds Megan Rapinoe sprinting up the Reign’s left wing:
Clearly, the Thorns are in big trouble now. Westphal and Natalia Kuikka were both pushing forward, leaving tons of space behind them. At this moment, Kuikka is dropping back but has to keep her eye on Le Sommer on the right, while Westphal is miles behind Pinoe, so Emily Menges and Becky Sauerbrunn are left in the lurch. Menges is left guarding Pinoe one on one, and that’s the ballgame.
Portland’s defense found themselves resorting to heroics a number of times in the game, as the Reign took advantage of that wide space. They also cleverly deployed Maroszán in a false No. 9 role, using her to press the Thorns’ deeper-lying players on defense and then combine with the midfield once her team won the ball. She was effective both with her pressing, as we saw above, and as a creator, notching two chances created on the stat sheet.
Defensively, Tacoma aimed to make the center of the field as claustrophobic as possible for Portland’s dangerous midfield. They used a low line of engagement, generally not pressing above the halfway line, but pestered the Thorns midfield aggressively in their own half. Here it also has to be said that the current Reign midfield of Fishlock, Lavelle, and Quinn—plus Maroszán, in practice—rivals the Thorns’ for the best in the league. Fishlock, obviously, eats nails for breakfast, Quinn is a gold medal-winning No. 6, and Lavelle is demonstrating she can be a destroyer in addition to an offensive wizard. In short: a formidable trio!
OL also tended to stay compact horizontally, the better to crowd the central midfield. In doing that, they often ignored the Thorns’ outside backs as they pushed forward in the attack. That left Kuikka and Westphal (and anyone else who found themselves wide of the goal area) open to send in crosses, but with the Reign defense packed in tight as Portland tended to be slow to find those options, only one cross out of 18 total found its mark.
This is where things get a little more nuanced. No doubt this was one of Portland’s poorer performances this year, but I also think it was a closer match than a 2–1 scoreline would imply. The defensive strategy I just outlined, like all defensive strategies, had some vulnerabilities. In particular, pressing always opens up space somewhere on the field, and in Tacoma’s case, that space was between their midfield and back line, which is quite a dangerous area of the field to leave space in!
Below, Angela Salem has just won the ball off of Kristen McNabb (I think) and tapped it to the white area that I think is Rodríguez, who is about to find Crystal Dunn in a big comfortable pocket ahead of the Reign defense:
After this, Fishlock and Quinn kept following the ball as the Thorns passed it around, Sophia Smith and Christine Sinclair stretched the OL back line, and Smith ended up with a clear shot at the goal—which she sent straight to Sarah Bouhaddi.
Smith had a handful of similar chances where the Reign midfield’s aggressive orientation toward the ball came back to bite them, ending the game with a team-leading six shots. In other words, the space was there, the Thorns were just too slow and inconsistent in recognizing and capitalizing on it.
That particular chance was a microcosm of Portland’s issues as a whole. A number of players, including Rodríguez and Menges, looked gassed from the starting whistle. This team has had an exhausting schedule in August, playing five games in 16 days. Smith in particular, though, seemed to exemplify what Mark Parsons identified postgame as the real fallout of that schedule.
“Physically I thought, some of the players today, they still looked like they could go,” he said. “But mentally, definitely. Mentally and emotionally, there was a little more in the tank for them, a little less in the tank for us.”
We’ve seen Smith struggle with finishing this season, but from the press box at least, this looked like a slightly different issue. Where in the past, she’s sometimes seemed to be overthinking where to place the ball once she gets in on goal, on Sunday she tended to find those chances and just… kick.
This isn’t to single Smith out—the team was a beat slow across the board, and understandably so. The full week of rest and training ahead is sorely needed, and hopefully the Thorns emerge looking more like themselves.
A lot of good things that I liked happened last night. Here is a list of the best things that happened, in my opinion:
1. Seven total hype reels throughout the evening
2. Barcelona playing in a super-organized possession-based style, which I would bet not a huge amount of money, but some money, that no team has ever done in Providence Park before
3. Wendie Renard (tall)
4. Mariona goals (two)
5. When Amandine Henry scored in the North End
Photo by Matthew Wolfe
6. Melvine Malard goal
7. The ideal combo of sophistication and technical prowess, on the one hand, and yakety sax defensive errors on the other; maybe the best soccer game I’ve ever seen in person
9. When the Thorns rotated as much of the team as possible because the same 15ish players have been doing everything for like a month and a half, they’ve been on the road two weeks in a row, and the team has four games in the space of 12 days, so a bunch of players got their first starts and minutes
10. When Natalia Kuikka scored with her head after telling her roommate Angela Salem she was going to score with her head
Before the game: Natu – “Ang, I’m going to score with my head today.” Me – “alright, yeah you are!” Natu – “I’m going to celebrate with you when I do.” Game begins…@nataliakuikka scores a header. Can’t make this up people!!! Love my roomie ❤️
11. When Olivia Moultrie did a direct free kick and it went in the goal, it was still cool even though the Houston keeper should have been able to save it
After this, Fishlock and Quinn kept following the ball as the Thorns passed it around, Sophia Smith and Christine Sinclair stretched the OL back line, and Smith ended up with a clear shot at the goal—which she sent straight to Sarah Bouhaddi.
