Categories
Soccer Thorns

So, How ‘Bout Them Thorns?

With the NWSL set to become the first American sports league to attempt a restart, the eight teams—minus the Orlando Pride, who, as we learned Monday, will sit out due to multiple positive COVID-19 tests on the team—that will participate in the Challenge Cup released their rosters yesterday.

One thing is certain: between a huge amount of offseason tumult and a stack of last-minute contracts—not to mention yesterday’s announcement that Tobin Heath will not participate—this won’t be a Thorns team we’ve ever seen before. A few of our thoughts on the newly announced roster are below.

Katelyn Best

Let’s just have fun, ok?

The Thorns, presumably, had a plan heading into this season. Amid whispers of a needed culture change, the club sent half the roster packing, snagged two promising young forwards at the draft, and made moves for Becky Sauerbrunn and Rocky Rodríguez. Fill in a few more blanks, and it’s easy to envision a good soccer team materializing—but those blanks never got filled. What we’re left with is pieces to a whole that never got finished.

Things were cast into even more doubt last week with the departure of Ellie Carpenter. With her departure, Sauerbrunn—a legendary but aging, and slowing, center back—starts to look less adequate as the season’s big defensive acquisition. The team has options at right back, but it’s hard to envision any of them filling Carpenter’s shoes on day one against North Carolina.

But here’s the good news: soccer is a game. More good news: this “season” isn’t real. Even more good news: historically, the Thorns have played some of their most fun, memorable games without their veterans. This isn’t the same as a World Cup or an Olympics—Lindsey Horan and Christine Sinclair will be there—but the tight schedule means we’re sure to see more squad rotation than we normally would. The sheer volume of new names on this roster means it’s impossible to guess which players are going to be the Meg Morrises or Simone Charleys of this tournament.

That’s not to mention the proven names new to this Thorns roster; Rodríguez obviously falls into that category, as does, I would argue, Sophia Smith. This group of forwards, in particular, is mostly quite young, and none of them are French, but I’d bet they’re going to be a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Wacky stuff is going to happen in this tournament. Let’s enjoy it, yeah?

Photo by Nikita Taparia
The Lindsey Horan conundrum

I have this theory that’s going to sound ridiculous when I say it, but bear with me: Horan is a problem. More specifically, the role Horan plays for the Thorns is a problem.

In 2016 and 2017, Portland deployed Horan and Amandine Henry in the central midfield as dual No. 8s. Both could play disruptor, both could set plays in motion, and both could make forward runs and score themselves. They would trade off on these duties, one sitting back while the other pushed into the attack, and this worked because Henry is just as good at all those things as Horan.

When Henry left, Mark Parsons wanted to continue using the same system, swapping Andressinha in alongside Horan. This went… less well. Andressinha simply isn’t a strong or physical enough player to fill that role. Since then, a succession of players have been tapped to fill that third midfield slot, including Celeste Boureille, Dagný Brynjarsdóttir, and Gabby Seiler. Boureille, for a moment in 2018, worked well; she doesn’t have Henry or Horan’s creative brilliance, but she proved to be a good disruptor deep in midfield. Seiler, for a still briefer moment in 2019, looked even more promising. But none of them have played as Horan’s double like Henry did—unsurprising, seeing as none of them are in the conversation for being the best central midfielder in the world.

This is the question: is there another player anywhere on earth capable of playing a second No. 8 alongside Horan as effectively as Henry did?

Parsons intends to try again with Rodríguez. On its face at least, this makes a lot more sense than trying to convert Andressinha into a No. 8 did, seeing as Rodríguez has played a box-to-box role in the NWSL, you know, ever, although never in the same system; at Sky Blue, she played alongside Sarah Killion, a much more defensive player than Horan. The question is how well Rodríguez can partner with a player who, at any moment, can show up anywhere on the field.

I’d describe myself as curious, leaning toward optimistic about this. At any rate, I’m excited to see Rodríguez, who I think has been underperforming for a few years, in a new environment. And if it doesn’t turn out? Try her at right back, why not!

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Leo Baudhuin

What the heck is going on with defense?

With all of nine players listed as defenders on this roster, one presumably would not have as many questions about Portland’s back line as I do. With a schedule that has the Thorns playing their opening three games over the course of nine days, rotation is going to happen, and I think it’s going to happen sooner than we expect.

If you look at a back four of Meghan Klingenberg, Emily Menges, Sauerbrunn, and Katherine Reynolds, something comes to the forefront pretty quickly: three of them are over 30 and two of them aren’t particularly fast. (Menges, of course, is the exception in both these statements, and Sauerbrunn isn’t slow, per se, but as Katelyn points out above, she’s definitely past her peak.) And while they’re all very capable players, the quartet leaves something to be desired against a fast, high-pressing North Carolina.

On the other hand, Parsons isn’t exactly known for throwing young players into the line of fire. But if these games don’t really matter, there’s no time like the present to experiment, right? Yeah, there’s still Kelli Hubly and Christen Westphal—and where is Seiler going to play? As the No. 6 in a diamond midfield? Somewhere in defense?—but I personally think it would be very cool if Madison Pogarch got the start on Saturday. And why not give Meaghan Nally and Autumn Smithers some time in this tournament while we’re at it?

Photo by Nikita Taparia
Some good news

Guess what I remembered today? Two-time NWSL Goalkeeper of the Year Adrianna Franch still plays for the Thorns. Not only that, but she won’t be missing games that she could be playing with the Thorns for national team duty.

Given the experimentation we’re going to see with this team, having arguably the best keeper in the league—and undisputedly the one with the best handling—means, worst comes to worst, at least we’ll see some great goalkeeping.

Tyler Nguyen

Young attackers will be in the spotlight

Tobin Heath has chosen to stay at home for this tournament. That is her right as a player, and it’s one that all the players in the NWSL have, as guaranteed by the negotiations between the player’s association and the league. Looking at the state of coronavirus cases in the US and Utah specifically, it’s a perfectly reasonable decision to make, and knowing how much she lives for soccer, it has to be an incredibly painful one.

What it means for the team is that, with the departures of Midge Purce, Hayley Raso, and Caitlin Foord in the offseason, no regular-rotation players from the 2019 forward line will play in the NWSL Challenge Cup. Sure, Christine Sinclair is listed as a forward, but you and I both know that’s not how it works, and in a compressed schedule, it’s even less how it works. Sinclair is simply not going to be running around full tilt for 90 minutes on three day’s rest, as much as I’m sure she wants to.

No, the forward line is going to a rotation of players who, while extremely talented, haven’t proven themselves as starters in the NWSL yet. This is going to be an attacking bullpen with no hierarchy and no secure starting places. Expectations are high for some of the talent on hand, but there’s quite a bit of depth, so the team can afford to take some risks if things need to be shifted around. 

Heath has such gravity in the team and is so important that when she’s in the team they will almost always play in a very specific way, with Heath one of the three up front drifting inside. No one plays exactly how she does, so without her, Parsons has experimented with back threes, relying on wingbacks for depth. But with Carpenter’s departure, the team has only one proven attacking option from deep in Klingenberg.

So where is the attack going to come from? Sophia Smith and Morgan Weaver, the Thorns’ first-round draft picks, were both wide players who specialized in cutting inside and shooting in college. The Thorns could, in theory, play only them up top and load up another player in midfield to get more creation there. That would mean leaving Simone Charley and Tyler Lussi out of lineups though, and both are high-energy players whose styles of play, in totally different ways, can completely throw defenses off guard. Charley’s ability with the ball at her feet on the break, and Lussi’s combination of strength and shooting mastery will both likely prove useful up against different defenses. Marissa Everett showed off a knack for poaching shots in her limited minutes last year, impressing the team enough to earn a contract this year, and Anika Rodriguez, yet another undrafted player the Thorns picked up this offseason, flashed some creative passing playing alongside Ashley Sanchez at UCLA. The depth probably doesn’t even end there. Parsons loves throwing young defenders into the fray as attackers: this is where Pogarch got her first minutes for the club, so the new defenders could absolutely see some minutes there. The possibilities seem endless. It’s now on these young players to make the most of their opportunities. 


2020 Thorns FC NWSL Challenge Cup roster

Goalkeepers (3): Bella Bixby, Britt Eckerstrom, Adrianna Franch (FED-USA)

Defenders (9): Kelli Hubly, Meghan Klingenberg, Emily Menges, Meaghan Nally (CDP), Madison Pogarch, Katherine Reynolds, Becky Sauerbrunn (FED-USA), Autumn Smithers, Christen Westphal

Midfielders (6): Celeste Boureille, Lindsey Horan (FED-USA), Emily Ogle, Rocky Rodríguez (INTL), Angela Salem, Gabby Seiler

Forwards (7): Simone Charley, Marissa Everett, Tyler Lussi, Anika Rodriguez, Christine Sinclair (FED-CAN), Sophia Smith (CDP), Morgan Weaver (CDP)

Key: CDP—2020 NWSL College Draft pick; FED—Federation Player; INTL—International Player

Categories
Soccer Thorns

Several Defensive Schema the Thorns Could Employ against the Courage

If you’re scratching your head at yesterday’s news that the Thorns have transferred Ellie Carpenter to Olympique Lyonnais, you’re not alone. Carpenter was one of the best outside backs in the league, famously matching up well in one-on-one situations against world-class offensive players like Megan Rapinoe. She also had something you can’t teach, something the rest of Portland’s back line—especially with Emily Sonnett having been swapped out for the 35-year-old Becky Sauerbrunn—is largely lacking: speed.

That’s of special concern when we look at the first matchup on the schedule in Utah: the North Carolina fucking Courage.

If starting the Challenge Cup against the back-to-back shield and championship winners wasn’t tough enough, the tournament format may make matters even harder. The Thorns tend to start slow and improve throughout the season; they don’t have time for that in Utah. They have to figure out how to win right away, and with an unproven offense, defense will be key. So who will shore up Portland’s back line in Carpenter’s absence? Let’s get into the Xs and Os and take a look at a few ways this defense could line up.

Gabby Seiler

Gabby Seiler seems as likely an option as any at right back. She’s been stymied by major injuries twice now, once before she’d reported to the team as a rookie, and then last year when she tore her ACL, but in the minutes she has gotten, she’s shown she can play at just about any defensive position. I’d argue she’s best employed as a No. 6, but with Parsons saying he wants to line Rocky Rodríguez up alongside Lindsey Horan as dual No. 8s, there isn’t room for her in a three-woman midfield. Seiler may not be as fast as Carpenter, but she had a 66.9% success rate in duels last season, better than Carpenter’s 42.9%, and she has both the physicality and the brains to stand up to the league’s toughest players.

Madison Pogarch

Madison Pogarch only played a handful of minutes in 2019, so she’s something of an unknown quantity. I do know the coaching staff is high on her, and that she’s fast and hard-working. I also remember watching her in preseason in 2019 and thinking, “wow!” Since that tournament wasn’t streamed, I have no way of confirming that memory. I’d say she’s a solid back-up option for Seiler.

Don’t Defend

Back in 2014, Paul Riley’s Thorns team team had a certain mystical quality where they were simultaneously good and bad, and also neither, at any time. This was a team that could beat the eventual champions 7–1 one week and then lose to Boston the next. It was high-concept soccer, where the concept was that it doesn’t matter how many goals you concede as long as you score one more than that.

Riley has grown as a coach since then. He still plays an extremely attacking style, but North Carolina’s defense has also been the stingiest in the league the past two seasons. So here’s my idea: since the Courage offense is all but unstoppable, why bother trying? Instead, Parsons could take a page from Riley’s own playbook and focus all the energy on breaking down that defense and scoring more goals than the opposition. That could look something like this:

The 1-1-3-6

The strength of this lineup starts with its front line of Sophia Smith, Tyler Lussi, Simone Charley, Morgan Weaver, Meghan Klingenberg, and Marissa Everett. All four strikers are fast; some are also technical and/or physical. Kling will play in her normal role, minus the defending part. Everett is an unproven quantity, but any other player on the roster runs the risk of being too defensive in that position. Tobin Heath, Rodríguez, Christine Sinclair, and Lindsey Horan will all both feed the forward line and make overlapping runs themselves.

Emily Menges is the goalkeeper, but will be tasked with covering the whole defensive half of the field as well as she can—as well as scoring, if possible. Let’s win this thing 15–14.

Human Pyramid

The spiritual opposite of the “don’t defend” strategy is the human pyramid. I’ve looked, and as far as I can tell there’s no rule against this.

I’m not envisioning a true human pyramid, but here’s the concept: build a wall on the goal line, then have the remaining players sit on the shoulders of the players in the wall. Where’s the ball going to go?

AD Franch can play in front of the player stack. Every time she catches the ball, she wastes as much time as possible, then kicks it as far away as she can. The concept here, obviously, is to play for a 0–0 draw, but it’s not hard to imagine the Courage getting so sick of this that at some point, the shoulder-sitters, with their fully rested legs, can rush the other goal and sneak one in.

Tobin Heath

She’s had to do it before. Why not this time?

Categories
Soccer

Simone Charley on What it Really Means to Confront Racism

In the wake of the current protest movement around racism and police brutality, I spoke with Thorns forward Simone Charley about her experiences over the last few weeks and beyond. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

You posted some of your thoughts a couple weeks ago on social media. One thing you wrote was something along the lines of “are you actually ready to do this—are you prepared to feel uncomfortable?”

Yeah. Um. I think just for me especially when I was writing that, and just talking about it, thinking about it, it was just challenging, just because I feel like at least for me that was the first time that I’ve kind of seen everything go full cycle in my lifetime. Like I remember when Black Lives Matter started after Trayvon Martin was killed and you know it gained steam and “popularity,” and all of that, and then it died off. And we’ve seen it happen, police brutality and systemic racism in general, just continue. And so now I feel like it’s the first time I’m seeing the second wave and I feel like I just got some serious déjà vu, which I think is why I’ve been reluctant to be excited and like, happy about it. I think when we talk about racism and stuff, kind of like I put in the post, we’re talking about being uncomfortable. I think it’s a lot of confronting racism within yourself, and I think that can be challenging for people, especially, a lot of times I feel like we think of racism as like, there’s “a racist” and “a not-racist.” I feel like racism is more of a spectrum—how racist are you?—as opposed to whether or not it’s a good apple or a bad apple, and I feel like that’s uncomfortable for people, because racism isn’t limited to being in the KKK. It can be just a simple microaggression on a day-to-day basis.

You also wrote, “faking it or half-trying hurts more than it helps.” Could you talk about that?

Yeah. I think just kind of similar to what I was saying earlier as far as seeing it come full cycle. It’s like, I feel like it almost seemed trendy to post on social media, whether it was Blackout Tuesday, or anything Black Lives Matter. And I feel like that can hurt the movement, because then when you have a whole bunch of people pretending to care, then it can convince people that “oh, you see everyone cares, and everyone’s trying to not be racist,” and think that “oh, see, obviously things are changing, and we’re all on the same page!” when in actuality, that might not be the case. And so, I think that’s why I was saying, don’t fake it if you’re not actually there and you’re not willing to do the work. Because if you’re not willing to do the work, then nothing’s going to change and we’re going to be here again like we are this time and [were] the last time, in the first movement. Or first wave of the movement happened.

What has it been like for you over the past two weeks to continue going to training and worry about soccer and fight for a roster spot?

Definitely been challenging, I would say. I think when everything first happened, that was a hard couple of days for me, just grappling with that. I think seeing the huge contrast between—I feel like the contrast was just very apparent between my life and my teammates’ lives, just because, you know, something like that happens and that impacts me. That impacts my family. I think of my brother; I think of my dad. I think of the cycle I was talking about, and I was just very sad. Whereas I think for a lot of my teammates, obviously it’s sad for them, but it doesn’t affect them the same way. So their lives can just continue. And I think that contrast was very apparent in the beginning. But I would say I’m very proud of my team and how we’ve kind of addressed it now, where we’ve been having the hard conversations about race, and our team and staff are like, listening to podcasts, and having weekly discussions about it, and someone started a book club, and we’re reading So You Want to Talk about Race? And like, willing to have those discussions. So I would definitely say it’s been somewhat of a rollercoaster, where it started off where I just felt very isolated, but I feel like now our team has been doing an amazing job of taking steps towards confronting racism within themselves as well as within the community.

Photo by Matthew Wolfe

Who started those conversations—not naming names, necessarily, but is that something you or your other teammates of color started, or is that was that something your white teammates started?

Yeah, kind of a group of teammates. An intermix, a group of both Black and white teammates did, and kind of like addressed it as a team a few days after everything went down. Which I think that was very important, that it wasn’t just a Black person saying something, but it was Black and white. And then also our staff—staff members reached out shortly after that conversation to just see, okay, what can we do to further support you. So, kind of a group of people.

I don’t know if you saw what Jeremy Ebobisse wrote a week or two ago—

Yeah!

He talked about this whiplash feeling, where he’s been wanting to talk about these issues with his teammates, with people in his life, and has not been able to do that for so many years, and now all of a sudden it’s like, “oh, now you want to talk about this…” I’m wondering if you share that experience.

Oh, 100%. It’s very interesting. I think just—it’s interesting because I feel like people are open in a way that they haven’t been before, which I think has been interesting—I don’t know how else to word that. I think of like, I’ve had teammates who—one of my teammates from college who reached out to me wanting to discuss race and things like that. And it was just very challenging for her, just confronting it, and it was interesting because in college, me and her had had many conversations about race, but she admitted to me on the phone she just didn’t really believe me, and it just didn’t seem real to her, but like, now it does. And it’s like, it’s a interesting feeling. Obviously I appreciate your willingness to like, understand and be more open, but at the same time it’s like, I’ve been saying this, you know? So it’s interesting.

Soccer in America is a really white sport—I want to ask you in a broad sense what your experiences were like growing up in that system.

Yeah. Um. I think that’s kind of hard to unpack. I just think that growing up, I was always one of the only Black people on the soccer team, and I feel like it’s something, as you get older you notice it more, but I feel like it’s just something I got used to, and it’s just what it was. And so—yeah. I feel like—is there anything in particular you want me to talk about in that experience?

Well, I guess in part, expanding on the last question about being able to talk about race with your teammates—which, I can’t imagine how much harder that would have been as a young person.

I would say, I feel like at least for me, I would want to talk about race, especially growing up when things would happen. Not when I was very young, because I think you don’t really know what’s going on. But I think of, once you get in like, high school, something happens and you’re like, “hmm. I don’t know how I feel about that. But I wouldn’t really talk about race like that, because being one of the only Black people on your team, you don’t want to like, draw attention to your—what am I trying to say? Yeah, I don’t know. I just feel like it was something I didn’t want to bring up. I would just internalize it and I wouldn’t, I would just feel like people wouldn’t understand, so why bring it up? So I just wouldn’t. Because that’s how it always was, it was just the new normal at one point, and it’s only recently that it’s like, wait, that shouldn’t be normal, and that shouldn’t be okay, and we should be able to speak about these things.

Photo by Matthew Wolfe

Portland, also, as we know, is a very white city, and you moved here on your own a couple years ago—

[Laughs] Yeah.

Has the whiteness of this city been challenging for you?

Yeah. It’s definitely interesting. I think when I first moved here, I remember just like, joking with my parents, being like, “there’s really no Black people here? This is crazy!” You can walk down the street, go a whole day, and not see a Black person! Which is like, definitely an adjustment, I would say. Which I also think is super interesting too, because I feel like Portland prides itself on being inclusive and all that, which is awesome, you see like, signs in stores that say, “oh, we accept all religions and sexualities and races,” all of that. But it’s just, I mean it’s just funny, because it’s like, super inclusive, but there’s also not the diversity there to necessarily be inclusive? That’s just a funny thing. But I do think it was challenging for me in the beginning. I think when you don’t see people who look like you and have the same experience as you, especially when it comes to making friends and stuff, I think obviously I appreciate and value my friendships I have with my white friends, but at the same time, I do appreciate having Black friends, because there’s a level of understanding of like, my experience, that my friends that are Black can understand that my white friends don’t understand in the same way. I think that was definitely challenging for me in the beginning.

You broke onto this team in what I have to imagine was a pretty stressful way—by essentially training for free. I don’t want to make assumptions about your socioeconomic situation, but for a person who’s able to have their parents pay for their apartment or something, that situation is a lot easier. There’s an intersection there between class and race—rich white people will find it easier to break into the sport this way than people of color, and people who didn’t grow up with money.

Yeah. I would say I’m blessed and fortunate that my parents were able to help me during that time, but I started working at a gym that was close by. I was living with a host family. Yeah, I was working at a gym and training people on the side and stuff like that, and then in the offseason I was doing a whole bunch of odd jobs—Postmates, I was delivering food, stuff like that. But yeah, I would say I’m blessed in that my parents were able to help me during that time, but I know that that’s definitely not the case for a lot of people, and if that was the case, I don’t know how much—if I would have been able to be here playing, and been able to make it through a whole year of essentially being unemployed.

If you could tell the white soccer establishment anything about what you think needs to change in this sport, what would that be?

I would say expanding the lens of how to evaluate and review Black athletes. Because I feel like especially, at least in my experience in soccer, I feel like a lot of times Black soccer players are put in a box of, oh, we’re athletic, or we’re fast, or powerful, tenacious—things like that. As opposed to, “you’re a very technical player,” or “you have a high soccer IQ.” Things like that. I feel like a lot of times, regardless of how technical or smart you may be, a lot of times Black athletes are put in a box of just being athletic, and that’s what they’re applauded for. I think that we need to expand our thinking and ask ourselves, “why are we just saying they’re athletic? Are they technical? Are you a smart player?” Making sure, yeah, that we’re not limiting players and putting players in a box like that.

Has that been your personal experience, getting put in that “athletic, fast” box?

I think that’s been something I’ve experienced. I think I’ve seen that happen to Black teammates, as well, Black teammates I’ve had.

Is there anything you feel like the media needs to do better in covering race issues within the sport?

I would say just having more conversations about it. Obviously it’s very important as far as like, talking about gender equality and stuff, that’s a huge deal, and pay equity, all of that is super important. I also think race conversations should happen more often as well, because that’s also a very real reality for a lot of players. So I would say it’s more just continuing the conversation, continuing to have conversations like this, so that we can highlight the different experiences that players have, and even talk like, what I was saying earlier about having players be put in a box. I think we can highlight that and people know that. Just being more aware, I think is a thing that could make a big difference.

Categories
Not Soccer

A Message to My Fellow White Portlanders

For the last few days, we at the Rose City Review have been talking about how to approach what is happening in America today—the collective explosion of grief and anger over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and of so many other Black Americans before them, at the hands of a racist police system.

One thing was clear to all of us: we can’t sit back and pretend this has nothing to do with us, simply because we cover soccer. Sports don’t exist outside of society at large. We don’t get to use them as an escape when people are fighting for their lives.

So the next question was what we, as non-Black people, can and should do in this space. My first impulse was to simply make a public donation to Don’t Shoot PDX (made possible by your Patreon contributions), use our site and Twitter feed to amplify Black voices, and say little else. But I think that’s a cop-out. We don’t want to talk over Black people, and we don’t want to make this about us or our feelings; at the same time, being afraid of making those mistakes is a comfortable way for us (and by us I mean both the writers at this site and all non-Black people) to opt out of the personal responsibility we all bear when it comes to dismantling white supremacy.

Here’s the thing: there are reasons that as a publication in Portland, specifically, our staff is four-fifths white, with no Black contributors. There are reasons the Timbers Army and Rose City Riveters are overwhelmingly white. I think—I hope—that acknowledging those reasons is a good place to start this discussion.

A very brief history lesson on racism in Portland

Portland is the whitest major city in America. This is not an accident. When Oregon became a state in 1859, its constitution explicitly forbade Black people from living, working, or owning property within its borders. The 14th Amendment invalidated that law, but it remained formally on the books until 1926—and Oregon itself didn’t ratify the 14th and 15th Amendments until 1973 and 1959, respectively.

The message was clear: people of color were not welcome in Oregon. Racist whites, on the other hand, very much were welcome. According to Walidah Imarisha, an educator and expert on Black history in Oregon, in the 1920s, it was not the deep south, but Oregon, where the Ku Klux Klan had the highest per-capita membership in the country.

During World War II, Portland became a shipbuilding hub, and as workers were drawn to the city to work in the shipyards—and as Black people moved north and west as part of the Great Migration—the Black population grew from 2,000 to 20,000. Many of those workers and their families lived in the racially segregated Vanport housing development. When Vanport was destroyed in a 1948 flood, displaced Black residents moved to redlined Albina, which, under a policy of the Portland Realty Board, was the only neighborhood in the city where people of color were allowed to buy homes.

Over the ensuing decades, Albina—like Black neighborhoods in cities across the country—came to be seen as “blighted” and was targeted for a series of “urban renewal” projects that displaced residents and fragmented the community. The Memorial Coliseum, I-5, and Highway 99 were all built in the 1950s on land Black residents had been forcibly displaced from. In the 60s, more than 1000 housing units in the heart of the Black community were destroyed to build Emanuel Hospital, a “classic top-down planning effort,” according to urban planning professor Karen J. Gibson (I encourage you to read that entire article, which I am summarizing here).

By the 90s, systemic disinvestment, predatory lending practices, and redlining by conventional banks had led to widespread abandonment of housing and prevented Black residents from getting loans to buy and repair homes in their own community. The City of Portland stepped in—partially at the behest of community activists—foreclosing on abandoned houses and cracking down on banks that refused to lend to potential buyers in the area. But rather than benefitting the Black community, these changes meant a flood of white buyers snapping up cheap property in what are, geographically, desirable central-city neighborhoods, while Black residents were largely displaced to far-flung areas in east Portland and Gresham.

That legacy of racism, of the systematic exclusion and displacement of Black communities in our state and city, lives on today.

Homelessness, Portland’s most visible injustice, disproportionately impacts people of color. Black people in Portland have long faced physical violence at the hands of both the police and white supremacists outside police ranks. The Portland Police Bureau’s euphemistically named Gun Violence Reduction Team—formerly called the Gang Enforcement Team—was found by a 2018 audit to be disproportionately stopping Black motorists, often using minor traffic violations as a pretext, and with no evidence showing that they effectively targeted gang members. Police shot and killed 17-year-old Quanice Hayes in 2017 and the city spent three years blaming his mother for his death.

Racism is a Portland issue.

What does this have to do with me?

I say all this because no conversation about race in this city can happen without acknowledging not only the existence of this racist history, but the fact that white people—all of us—have benefitted from it. Here’s just one example: as Gibson points out, part of what makes Portland such a desirable place to live is its urban growth boundary, which constrains sprawl, makes walking and biking feasible, and means natural spaces are a short drive away from anywhere in the city.

It also means that space for housing is limited. Centrally located Albina, Gibson contends, was likely always destined for gentrification. If you can afford to live in Portland, this has benefited you directly.

That’s just one of the myriad ways white people everywhere benefit from white supremacy; we also have access to vastly higher generational wealth, are arrested and convicted of crimes at lower rates, don’t face housing discrimination, and are much less likely to die at the hands of a police officer. Our children go to better-funded schools and are disciplined at lower rates. That’s a scratch in the surface.

What does this have to do with soccer?

The soccer community in Portland is many things. For me, a queer white woman, it’s been a very welcoming space. It’s a space inhabited by people who tend to proudly call themselves anti-fascist and anti-racist. People in this space do genuine good work for the community. It’s also—like most things in this city—overwhelmingly white, and often willfully ignorant of its own blind spots and how those lead to complicity with racism.

Here is a fact: if you’re white, you have not personally been harmed by fascist policies in this country. Waving the Iron Front flag, and waging a fight for your right to keep waving it, is a fine gesture, and not one without importance, but ultimately it’s just that—a gesture. It is not the same as supporting the communities actually impacted by state-sanctioned violence.

Here is another fact: white people, before we do anything else, have a responsibility to listen to and elevate the voices of people of color, especially Black people. We cannot wave our hands in the general direction of equality and pretend that all oppressions are equal. We need to put people of color—especially women and queer and trans people of color—in positions of power. A community organization whose leadership is entirely white cannot seriously claim to be anti-racist. Especially when people of color within the organization are being ignored.

Finally, soccer in America is a pay-to-play sport designed to funnel rich white players to the top levels at the expense of players from marginalized communities. When we talk in lofty tones about the unifying power of the world’s game, but gloss over the reality of the sport on the ground in this country, we are being dishonest. We are erasing communities of color who are systematically locked out of this game.

So, at the same time as I am challenging myself to do more work as an ally, I am challenging every white person reading this to do the same. This can be uncomfortable. I get it. We all want to think of ourselves as good people, good allies. The solution to that discomfort isn’t denial or disavowal, but action: you can decide right now that you care enough about Black lives to start actively working on their behalf.

What should I do?

There’s a lot to be said here, and I won’t pretend to be an expert or an educator on this issue, but I will start by recommending a handful of educational resources. So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo is an excellent resource for white people with any level of comfort or discomfort talking or thinking about race. White Fragility, as the title implies, discusses why white people find it so hard to talk about race. The New Jim Crow deals with how mass incarceration has been used as a tool to systematically oppress Black people. Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, also about mass incarceration, is on Netflix. As I challenge myself to keep learning about these issues, I have just ordered a copy of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which I have heard is excellent.

Educating yourself—which includes confronting your own racist beliefs, which we all have, by virtue of living in a deeply racist society—is just a starting point, however.

If you can afford it, financially supporting Black community organizations—as well as Black-owned businesses—is a powerful, tangible thing you can and should do on a regular basis (a list of a few such organizations is at the end of this article). Whether or not you can afford to give money away, you can also volunteer your actual time.

Protesting, during the pandemic, is complicated, but if you’re a low-risk person who is able to isolate yourself afterwards, consider that many people of color are currently putting their lives at risk—both from the police and COVID-19—to fight for their right to exist. Consider that you, as a white person, are realistically only impacted by one of those risks.

Finally, and this is work that will be ongoing for a long time, talk to other white people. Speak up when you witness racism—not just visible, public violence, but microaggressions from the people you see on a daily basis. Make a promise to yourself that you’ll do this. Practice if you need to. If you can, ask your employer or school what they are doing to support your Black coworkers and classmates during this time.

Talk to your friends, neighbors, and families, especially older relatives. It isn’t enough to roll your eyes at the racist aunt at Thanksgiving and wait until she shuts up. Talk to her. You don’t have to start a fight—that doesn’t work, anyway—but don’t be afraid of making things uncomfortable. There are many resources out there for these conversations, including the books I listed above. Again, practice what you’re going to say. Deep breath. Your discomfort is nothing compared to the very real violence people of color face on a regular basis.

Finally, I hope you’ll pass this along: ask the white people around you what they’re doing to confront racism. Hold yourself and others accountable. Hold us accountable.


Here is a list of organizations you can donate to, local and elsewhere, compiled by Don’t Shoot Portland. The list includes Portland’s Nat Turner Project and the PDX Protest Bail Fund for those arrested protesting in Portland. Other local organizations include the Urban League of Portland and Self Enhancement, Inc, who also have a list of Black-owned businesses on their website.

Categories
Not Soccer Soccer Thorns

Welcome to the Dark Side

Right off the bat, let’s be clear: the Thorns are not evil. They are a group of human women who play soccer professionally—emphatically not a shadowy warrior cult strong in the dark side of the Force. None of them would ever murder their dark mentor as part of the ancient, never-ending cycle of apprentice betraying master. I doubt any of them even owns a laser sword.

But, I mean…

You know what they say: a rose by any other name would be equally vicious and power-hungry

It’s not like they don’t want us to make that connection, right?

Witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle station, brought to you by Providence Health & Services

So, if the Thorns were both fueled and consumed by a supernatural rage, and they did all own laser swords, and if their laser swords were the glowing red of a Dathomirian sunset, what would that look like? In other words, which Sith Lords best exemplify the essences of which Portland Thorns?

Lindsey Horan: Darth Vader

In the 2015/2016 offseason, the Thorns were coming off a dark year. Their season had been thrown into turmoil by the Clone Wars 2015 World Cup, they’d just shaken up their coaching staff, and the roster was undergoing an almost total rebuild. One bright spot on the horizon was Lindsey Horan, the immensely talented young American whose arrival had been foretold generations ago as the one who would bring balance to the Force. Like Vader, Horan does it all, by herself if she needs to: she defends, she sets attacks up, and she scores, sometimes all in a single play.

Christine Sinclair: Darth Sidious

Christine Sinclair may be one of the best goal scorers of all time, but for a player as immensely powerful as she is, her game is surprisingly understated. She’s cool and calculated, always lurking near goal when you least expect her, waiting for the fortuitous moment to strike. She makes an impact even when the other team thinks they’ve got her marked out of the game. And off the field, she’s famously quiet. She’s been in charge for years, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you might not even know it.

Tobin Heath: Darth Maul

A double-bladed lightsaber is the sword version of a cheeky nutmeg: few people can even control it without putting themselves in danger, let alone use it effectively in a duel. Some would call it unnecessarily flashy, but unnecessary flash is exactly what makes millions of people fall in love with the game. In my book, Tobin Heath gets unfairly labeled as all style and no substance too often, but the style? Nobody can deny the style.

Becky Sauerbrunn: Count Dooku

Count Dooku was a Jedi master—trained by none other than Yoda—who turned to the dark side late in his career, setting in motion key events in galactic history. While Becky Sauerbrunn has yet to put on a Thorns jersey, it’s not hard to imagine that one of the most decorated center backs of all time could be a difference maker for a team whose weak point has been defense in recent years. She’s already won two NWSL championships and two World Cups—a third NWSL ring, presumably suffused with dark energy and giving off a faint red glow, would be a great addition to that trophy case.

Mark Parsons: Darth Bane

Mark Parsons isn’t a Thorn, per se, but bear with me: Darth Bane was the ancient Sith lord who restructured an order on the brink of collapse. He introduced the rule of two, which limits the entire Sith order to a single master and their apprentice. When Parsons arrived in 2016, the Thorns were on shaky ground, and he restructured the team in a number of ways, bringing in a largely new roster and building a team-focused culture that prioritizes hard work and effort. The Thorns as we know them today wouldn’t exist without him.

 

Categories
Food Not Soccer

Here’s the Truth about Scrambled Eggs

There aren’t too many foods I don’t like, but poorly scrambled eggs are near the top of the list. Most foods, prepared incorrectly, are at worst bland or disappointing, but messed-up eggs I find borderline disgusting. And therein is a problem: a lot of people think they know how to scramble eggs. They don’t.

The good news is there are many correct ways to scramble eggs. Curd size, whether you crack them into the pan or into a bowl, whether you add other stuff… all those variables are up to personal preference (although there is some nuance to the question of adding stuff, which I will get to momentarily). There are, however, several ironclad laws of egg scrambling.

The Rules (in order of importance):
  1. Don’t overcook the eggs
  2. Cook the eggs over low heat
  3. Add salt before cooking
Let me explain.

The first law is the most important, because of the way proteins are. A protein is a big coiled-up lump of a molecule, like a crumpled-up length of wire. When you cook it, two things happen. First, it uncoils (this is called denaturing); next, it clumps back together, but in different shapes, trapping little pockets of water inside the food (this is called coagulation).

When you overcook eggs, the proteins coagulate too tightly and basically wring the water out like a sponge being squeezed. They separate into a chewy, dry mass of egg and a puddle of water. Gross!

This is where rule two comes in, very close in importance to rule one. It is theoretically possible to get non-gross scrambled eggs over high heat; diner-style eggs are cooked over higher heat, and are not always bad. You have to move really, really fast for this to work, though—we’re talking 30 seconds or less on the heat.

Don’t do that. Instead, follow rule two and cook your eggs over low heat. It takes some trial and error to get to know the right temperature, but always err on the side of too low. Generally, if you see the eggs start to cook as soon as they touch the pan, it’s too hot. It should take a moment before you see anything happening.

There is a sub-rule attached to both the first and second rules. Repeat after me: done in the pan, overdone on the plate. Like anything else you cook, eggs will keep cooking briefly after you take them off the heat. Take a deep breath and serve them just before you think they’re done. You’ll be fine.

On to rule three. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about salt and eggs. Many people think salting scrambled eggs before you cook them is how you end up with dry eggs in a puddle. It is not; refer back to rule one. I have heard it said that you should wait until right before you start cooking to add the salt, and that’s still what I do, out of habit, but I’m honestly not sure if it matters.

The point is this: if you don’t season your eggs before you cook them, you won’t be eating seasoned eggs, you’ll be eating bland eggs with salt on top. There are worse things in the world, which is why this is only rule three, but it’s still not what you want. Add a generous pinch as you’re mixing the eggs up.

Ok, but what else?

I personally like medium-size curds in my eggs. I don’t want big chunks, but I also don’t usually want super-custardy, Gordon Ramsay-style heart attack eggs:

That means cracking the eggs into a bowl, stirring with a fork until I don’t see streaks of white, seasoning with salt, pouring into melted butter in a pan over low heat, and stirring regularly but not constantly.

Some people like to see bits of white; that’s their preference and I respect it. That means you can stir more or less, and it also means it’s perfectly OK to crack the eggs directly into the pan, as long as you then follow the three rules.

Aren’t you going to put any ____ in there?

I, personally, for the most part, am not. Occasionally if I have some green onions to use up, I’ll add those—cooked in the butter just a little before I add the eggs. Certain fresh herbs can also be good. Cheese if I’m really hungry, added toward the end of the cooking process. I used to have a roommate who would put a dollop of crème fraîche, which is fucked up in the sense of being very delicious and probably making you feel like you’re about to die after you eat it. But who has crème fraîche lying around?

In my opinion, you need to be pretty careful with anything else. Any vegetables that are particularly watery are going to cause a problem. Some—mushrooms, onions, leeks, peppers, asparagus, off the top of my head—you could get away with if you cooked them first (see also: every episode of Great British Bake Off where someone puts raw fruit or whatever into their bread). Others, like tomatoes (dried tomatoes excepted) are an absolute hard no. I also wouldn’t use greens of any kind, pre-cooked or not, because I don’t think those two textures work together. Certain meats work fine, but I don’t eat meat, so don’t ask me about that.

Overall, though, I just don’t find putting more stuff in there really adds anything. If you want eggs with stuff in them, make an omelette (and yes, I also feel very strongly about the right way to do that). In my opinion, scrambled eggs aren’t a vehicle for other foods; they should be enjoyed on their own merit. But hey: as long as you follow the three rules, chase your bliss.

Categories
Soccer Thorns

This Magic Moment

“Do you know what? Yeah. It might take us a while to get to where we want to get to, but we’re gonna get there, and you can just remember this fucking goal.”

When the Thorns aired their first-ever home game, against the Reign, last weekend, I recognized almost nothing. Christine Sinclair, of course, was there, looking roughly the same as she had since 2005 and also roughly the same as she looks today. Other than her? Any familiar faces were shuffled out of place. Mana Shim sat on the bench, anonymous. Michelle Betos was in goal for the other team. Alex Morgan, well—that’s an article unto itself, the story of who Alex Morgan was in Portland, who people thought she was, who they wanted her to be, how they remember her today. Allie Long, I guess, was more or less the same player, but she didn’t look the same.

Weirdly, the Seattle Reign, in terms of personnel anyway, felt more familiar. The team underwent massive turnover between 2013 and 2014, but the bones of who they would be over the next few years were already in place. There was Laura Harvey, of course; on the field, there were Lu Barnes, Elli Reed, Keelin Winters, Jess Fishlock.

Ah, Jess Fishlock.

It’s strange to think that we ever didn’t know who Fishlock was, but back then, of course, pretty much nobody in the states did. This was the curse of coming from a country like Wales in 2013—even avid women’s soccer fans simply had no way of watching her. On that day, the commentators (Ann Schatz, may god bless her and keep her, was another familiar feature of that broadcast) explained we should watch the woman who looked kind of, but not really, like Megan Rapinoe.

The crowd didn’t know yet who Fishlock was, how they were supposed to respond to her, but on some instinctive level, she knew exactly who she was to them. “I love a big crowd,” she says of Providence Park. “It’s like a cauldron in there. It’s amazing.”

This is the thing about Fishlock: in her own way, she loves Portland, and Thorns fans, whether they admit it or not, need her. A villain, like a photographic negative, forms and sharpens a club’s vision of itself. Without an antagonist, there’s no reason to watch.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Fishlock announced herself quickly that day. Despite playing for what would turn out to be an abysmal Reign side—”I already knew by that point it was going to be a slog,” she remembers—she was the best player on the field, for either team.

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t want to hear that. Keep in mind, though, that the actual soccer in the NWSL in 2013 was really rather bad. Few players could quite control the ball; fewer still could reliably pass it along the ground to another player.

Amid the chaos, Fishlock gave us a glimpse into the future. She was physical, of course, but unlike with the thoughtless and often bizarre violence being carried out by those around her (on both sides), there was a purpose to everything she did. As the game went on, she was clearly frustrated, but she was also laser-focused. Her frustration only seemed to sharpen her. This player—physical, athletic, wildly competitive, but incredibly skilled—was the embodiment of what the NWSL would become over the next six years. She was the ideal NWSL player before the NWSL really existed.

As the Thorns went up a goal, then two goals, as 16,000 fans clapped and sang and reveled in seeing their new team for the first time, she knew what had to happen.

“I don’t want us to leave here,” she remembers thinking, “and have them have a clean sheet… We were like, ‘fuck’—excuse my French—we were just like, ‘fuck, if we’re gonna lose, fine, we’re gonna fucking lose, but we’re gonna fucking score. Like, because we’re gonna make sure that these [the fans] are like, dead silent for like, a millisecond.’”

And then, right on cue, she did, cleanly slotting a half-volley just inside the post as Winters knocked Nikki Marshall over. Just as Fishlock had planned, the stadium was silent for a heartbeat. She pounded the crest on her shirt and pumped her fist, and Providence Park erupted.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Fishlock is the perfect villain not because she’s physical, or even because she dives, but because she is undeniably very, very good. There was no shortage of fouls in that game, but if that was what mattered, Kaylyn Kyle would have been marked down as an enemy, too. What mattered was the goal—the spoiling of the Thorns’ home debut.

That moment, in retrospect, would prove more definitional for the Thorns—not as a team, necessarily, but as a club—than anything else that happened that season, including the championship win. It was as if everyone in the stadium, in unison, suddenly remembered a fundamental fact about the world. Here is our team; here is our enemy. Thus has it always been, and thus shall it ever be.

The end of that season ushered in an era of rapid change in Portland. Cindy Parlow Cone left. Paul Riley arrived in a whirlwind, then blew away in a cloud of dust. Kat Williamson left, then came back, then retired, Vero Boquete and Jessica McDonald both spent short, magnificent stints in Portland, Nadine Angerer became a fixture. Through it all, Thorns fans made regular pilgrimages to a concrete relic in the shadow of the Space Needle, hoping that this time they’d get to drive home victorious, fixing their ire on the diminutive Welshwoman when they didn’t.


A play in three acts:

“I actually miss her,” Nash Drake, the Thorns fan who composed the first tweet above, confessed to me. “The thing about Fishlock is that she understands what rivalry means… It’s kind of like two guys sitting around drinking beer and hitting each other.”

This is rivalry in its highest form: a drama that goes on as long as there’s something for it to go on about, but which both sides, at the end of the day, know they’re choosing to participate in. It’s real, but it’s also not real. We’re doing it because it’s fun.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if it turned out we couldn’t all be friends?

Categories
Soccer Thorns

185

Ed. note: this article originally appeared in the June 2019 print edition of Howler. Since the time of publication, obviously, certain facts, including the one big fact, have changed. We have presented it unedited. Enjoy!


Stripped down to its essential components, soccer is an incredibly simple game. The point is to put the ball through a specified rectangle of air, delineated by a set of goalposts, more times than the other team. So if you want to define who the best soccer players are, there’s one easy, reductively simple answer: they’re the ones who score the most goals.

Which means that at the international level, the best player of all time is retired American forward Abby Wambach.

Wambach scored 184 goals in her 256 caps, which works out to just over .7 goals per game. She scored her first on April 27, 2002, in a friendly against Finland, and her last on August 19, 2015, in a World Cup victory tour friendly against Costa Rica.

On the field, Wambach was a striker’s striker, about as pure a target woman as they come, her game centered around pace, athleticism, and strength. She was a masterful header of the ball, making what should be a blunt instrument look like a finely honed weapon, using it to score over and over, often in spectacular fashion. Off the field, she could be brash and occasionally guileless, epitomizing, both as a person and a player, the rah-rah ethos of American soccer: run fast, jump high, and never, ever give up.

It’s a curious thing, then, that just below her on the list of top international goal scorers is a soft-spoken, self-effacing Canadian named Christine Sinclair, a player who represents, existentially if not quite athletically, Wambach’s exact opposite.

Sinclair is quiet where Wambach was loud, shrinks from attention where Wambach has cheerfully done the cable talk circuit, leads by example where Wambach was known for curse-filled pump-up speeches. Sinclair is, well, Canadian. And if she breaks her American colleague’s record, she will likely stand in perpetuity as, by the most literal definition possible, the greatest international soccer player of all time.


Canada Soccer once sent out a tweet reading simply:

Christine Sinclair

It was probably an accident, but as with so many great inventions, that doesn’t diminish its perfection. Those two words, and the negative space left by all the words that are absent, capture everything you need to know about Sinclair, which is that she’s a player so good and so far beyond reproach that her name itself is content. It also perfectly encapsulates what she is to Canadian soccer, which is to say: everything.


I.

Canada, of course, that frozen expanse to the north, is a hockey country. This is important for our purposes for several reasons.

First: like the United States and Australia, Canada is a country whose women’s soccer team ranks much, much higher in the global pecking order than their men’s team (those countries’ men rank 25th, 42nd, and 79th, respectively, while their women rank first, fifth, and sixth). That all three of these countries are members of the wealthy Global North whose citizenries have quite different sporting obsessions than the rest of the world is probably not a coincidence when it comes to women’s soccer—these are countries with resources to put into girls’ and women’s sports, where girls tend to be pushed out of more culturally significant athletic pursuits and into soccer.

Second: in women’s soccer, the difference in quality between the top few teams and everyone else is much, much starker than on the men’s side. Picture men’s and women’s soccer as separate landmasses. One has a nice, broad continental shelf extending out into the ocean, while the other ends in a sheer underwater cliff dropping straight into the abyssal zone. In this metaphor, on the women’s soccer continent, the United States is on land, while a handful of others, including France, England, Australia, and Canada—the only teams that can realistically hope to challenge the Americans in any given match—are fighting it out on a narrow beach.

That relates to Canada being a hockey country in that even though the Canadian women fall into that narrow shallow zone, they are still well below the level of the top-ranked USA. There’s a long-lived rivalry between the two neighbors, but it’s an extremely lopsided one, mainly significant in that it tends to bring out bad blood on both sides. The last time Canada won was in 2006; the two teams have faced each other 25 times since.

All this is to say, first, that Christine Sinclair would only have been possible in a few countries on earth, but more importantly, that she has personally made Canadian soccer what it is.


Christine Sinclair is related—she’s not sure exactly how—to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (“His mom is like, my dad’s great-aunt or something like that,” she says). I’m not sure if there’s a family resemblance, but it’s easy to squint a little and convince yourself there might be. They have the same dark hair, the same bright blue eyes.

They met once, in the run-up to the 2016 Olympics, when the team was in Ottawa, and Sinclair reported being surprised that Trudeau knew who she was. The team posed for a group photo with the Prime Minister on Parliament Hill, and she gave him a jersey with his name on it.


II.

If you ever happen to meet the Canadian captain, don’t tell her that (the part about personally building the Canadian national team, not the Justin Trudeau thing). She’ll deny it, and when she does, it won’t be out of false modesty, or even genuine modesty, but real pride in her teammates. And of course, saying she’s done everything herself is hugely hyperbolic, and does a disservice to a lot of very good Canadian players. The plain fact, though, is that Sinclair is by far the best soccer player Canada has ever produced.

To be clear, I mean much more that Sinclair, who would be a legend regardless of what country she came from, is good than I mean that Canada isn’t good. It’s just that coming from where she comes from, she elevates her team in a way someone like Wambach, playing alongside a half-dozen other players deserving of various superlatives, never did.

The game that best illustrates what Sinclair is to Canadian soccer is their semifinal loss in the 2012 Olympics against—who else?—the United States. It’s the game that Sinclair herself identifies as the moment women’s soccer arrived in her homeland. “Looking back on it,” she told me, “it’s probably the first time that Canadians truly, like, cared about how we did.”

It’s not hard to see why it had that effect. Played at Old Trafford, the game was an instant classic, the two teams trading goals until literally the last minute before the final whistle of extra time.

“We waited a long time to be able to compete with the Americans on that stage,” Sinclair remembers. “To have Canada finally reach that level and be able to hold our own against the number one team in the world, blow for blow.”

What she would never point out herself is that she’s the one who scored all three of Canada’s goals, very nearly sending the game to penalties and making her one of just three players1 to ever score a hat trick against the United States.

She opened the scoring in the 22nd minute, running onto a lateral flick from Melissa Tancredi, taking one deceptively simple, perfect touch as she charged forward and beat Rachel Buehler, then another as she cut right around Kelley O’Hara. With her third touch, she threaded a shot expertly between a diving Hope Solo and the far posther 141st career international goal.

Early in the second half, Megan Rapinoe equalized (with a fucking olimpico, of all things), and for the next 40-odd minutes, it was all-out war. Sinclair put Canada up again, then Rapinoe equalized a second time, then Sinclair put Canada up a third time. After a controversial penalty put away late in regulation by—who else?—Abby Wambach, the game headed to extra time with the two teams level 3-3.

Finally, in the 123rd goddamned minute, Alex Morgan took advantage of a moment of indecision by keeper Erin McLeod to head home a cross by Heather O’Reilly. The whistle blew. Canada’s gold medal hopes were over.

In the American soccer mythos, that final goal is remembered as a moment of classic USWNT heroism. A game that almost ended in heartbreak, saved in the final seconds because the gals just wouldn’t give up.

It’s all horribly predictable. The American women have won like this so many times, in so many big moments. In a movie version of the tournament, with the USA as the protagonists, you’d write it exactly like this, and critics would say it was a little on the nose.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t note that the officiating in this game was infamously one-sided, so I’ll unpack exactly what I mean by “controversial penalty.” It was the result of a questionable handball call when Rapinoe kicked an inside-the-18 free kick directly into Marie-Eve Nault. That free kick, in turn, was awarded for a bizarre time-wasting call against McLeod—after Wambach had spent the half counting out loud within earshot of the referee. There was also the missed handball call against Rapinoe earlier in the game, which I won’t get into.

For Canada, of course, the loss was crushing. But there were two positives:

  • They went on to beat France and win bronze.
  • Back in Canada, that vast, wild land where hockey reigns, four million Canadians saw Christine Sinclair score a hat trick against the US, and they saw how close her team came to beating the best in the world, and they began to see this tall, powerful woman as a national hero.

1As far as we know; there are two games where the US conceded at least three goals, against England in 1985 and against the Netherlands in 1991, for which we have no information on who scored (thanks to Jen Cooper for the stats).


Christine Sinclair has a Pomeranian named Charlie. She comes from a small-dog rescue near Portland, where she originally bore the name Cocoa Puff, something her owner says she “never envisioned [herself] calling a dog.” The name Charlie is a tribute to Clive Charles, the legendary University of Portland coach who played for the NASL Timbers with two of Sinclair’s uncles and led her college team to a championship in 2002. Sinclair would win a second championship with UP in 2005, two years after Charles’s death from prostate cancer.

Charlie’s favorite activities are eating, sleeping, and socializing.


III. 

Although being among the best in the world at a thing obviously requires innate ability, talent isn’t what anyone mentions when they talk about Sinclair. They talk, instead, about how she has always—in every moment she spends working on being a soccer player—dedicated herself to doing things as well as she possibly can.

“I love that I’ve had the opportunity to watch her,” says Mark Parsons, Sinclair’s head coach with the Portland Thorns, “because if I hadn’t, I would have thought Sinc was born to do this. And by seeing it, you realize this was man-made. This was all about her purposeful practice, her dedication, her preparation, her commitment. When other players missed the recovery, she’s doing recovery. When other players missed evaluating, watching films back, or practicing the shot [they] missed, when they miss it and they’re like ‘oh, it doesn’t matter, I’ll get it the next game,’ she’s doing [those things.]”

Sinclair’s training habits are a study in the pursuit of mastery. Like a concert violinist who spends an hour a day playing open-string exercises, or an Olympic weightlifter who practices snatches and clean-and-jerks with a broomstick, she has never stopped focusing on the most basic building blocks of her craft.

Thorns teammate Emily Menges described this to me. “We do touches sometimes for practice and it’s this close,” she said, standing a few feet away. “Little touches. It’s easy to be like, ‘this is boring, whatever,’ but every single one of her touches is absolutely perfect… Maybe I take a first touch and that’s what I’m worried about, is my first touch… But she’s very much like, ‘here’s my first touch, and then I have to make sure Emily has a good touch.’”

This meticulous focus, day after day, year after year, is what has made Sinclair one of the best of all time, and it has also probably contributed to her longevity as a player.

Comparing Sinclair with Wambach purely in terms of scoring rates, there’s a tortoise-and-hare dynamic. Wambach had a 14-year international career; this is Sinclair’s 19th year representing Canada. Sinclair started earlier, getting her first cap at just 16, and despite now being the age Wambach was when she retired, shows no sign she’s ready to hang up her cleats.

By this point in her career, Wambach had just taken a few months off from her club, the Western New York Flash, supposedly to focus on preparing for the 2015 World Cup—it was never clear why she didn’t consider the best preparation for a big soccer tournament to be actually playing soccer—and, perhaps as a result, showed up in Canada in what counted for her as very poor form2. Meanwhile, Sinclair has kept training and playing as she always has, and has stayed absolutely central to both the Thorns and the Canadian national team.

Several years ago, age started to take a toll on Sinclair’s sprinting speed, but where a lesser player might have kept grasping at the style she played at age 23 only to start slowly fading into obsolescence, she adapted her game, dropping into the number ten slot for both club and country. She still scores, but where before she preferred to charge toward goal at full speed, today she sits between lines and sets up her teammates with a final, immaculate pass as often as she shoots.

That positional shift has slowed down her scoring rate somewhat, but she’s still chipping away, inching ever closer to the record—and it’s arguably made her an even more essential piece than before for both club and country. It’s in part because she is perfectly content to step back, literally, from the front, that she has stayed one of the best in the world for so long.

2It has to be said here that not training or playing regularly with a team for eight-odd months and showing up to a World Cup capable of playing international soccer at all is still an incredible athletic achievement, one that says a lot about how good Wambach was.


Christine Sinclair is on a postage stamp. Designed for the 2015 World Cup, it also features Canada teammate Kadeisha Buchanan and Japanese keeper Ayumi Kaihori. Menges, her Thorns roommate on road trips, found out about this while the Canadian captain was recording an episode of a podcast called Arrow Living produced by Kendall Johnnson, another former Thorns teammate. It’s a wonderful scene. Johnson reads a list of Sinclair’s many awards and accomplishments, and when she gets to “you got a postage stamp of your face in 2015 for the World Cup,” Menges says, “no way!” in the background. A few minutes later, Menges announces she has bought her friend’s stamp on eBay. She still has it.


IV.

If Sinclair beats Wambach, her record will likely stand in perpetuity. To understand why that is, consider the fact that the top eight international goal scorers are all women. Iran’s Ali Daei, with 109 international goals to his name, is the only man with at least 100, a club that currently includes 16 women. Remember the two continents, one gently sloping into the sea, the other a rocky, craggy landmass surrounded by churning ocean?

Although both Wambach and Sinclair are among the very best to ever step onto a soccer field, the enormous volume of goals they have scored has as much to do with those rocks and crags—with the uneven, sometimes bizarre geography of women’s soccer—as it does with their skill as players.

Scorelines that are more or less unheard of in men’s soccer are fairly commonplace in women’s soccer. In the CONCACAF World Cup qualifying tournament this past fall, for example, the USA and Canada each won at least two games with scores of six or more goals to none; Canada beat Cuba, who did not score a single goal in the tournament, 12-0. Both Sinclair’s and Wambach’s goal tallies—along with those of Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Birgit Prinz, and many others—have had a big boost from those kinds of matches over the years.

The other factor to understand is that this kind of drastic inequality is shifting, if slowly and often painfully. A couple decades ago, the continent of women’s soccer was a tiny island; only a handful of countries even fielded teams, and those countries got enough of a head start over everyone else that they dominated the sport for years.

It’s because of this incremental but steady growth in the women’s game that no one is likely to come anywhere near 184 ever again. That World Cup qualifying tournament was a fluke for Canada’s schedule (somewhat less so for the US, whose federation is still happy to throw some real cupcakes into the mix of the dozen-plus friendlies they play each year); outside of official CONCACAF tournaments, where Canada is a big fish in a tiny pond, they’ve only won by more than two goals twice in the last three years. There is still a huge amount of inequality in the women’s game, but the federations that regularly field women’s sides now have enough real competition that there’s no reason to schedule friendlies against teams they’re going to drop a half-dozen goals on.


In 2017, Christine Sinclair was awarded the Order of Canada, her country’s second-highest civilian honor, something her Thorns teammates refer to as “getting knighted.” They learned about the award without any help from the woman who earned it.

“My teammates are dorks,” explains Sinclair. “They’re like, ‘do we have to call you queen now?’ So I try and keep those things quiet from them. I’d just hear about it all the time.”


V.

If you were to list the most important facts about Christine Sinclair, in order, her goal tally would probably be third on the list. The two facts battling it out for the top spot would be as follows:

  • Is one of the best soccer players of all time
  • Is an almost unbelievably nice person

Sinclair has earned the right to brag, to yell that she’s the best, to take selfish shots when she gets the chance. But if she was the kind of person who did those things, she would not be in the position she’s in.

Life—in sports, under capitalism, in nature at large—is a horrifically unfair endeavor. Success is determined as often as not by sheer random chance, and the rest of the time, the thing is fucking rigged.

In this context, Sinclair’s story has an almost religious resonance. Here is this person who got where she is by years of diligent hard work, by playing for everyone except herself, by care and kindness for the people around her. She is never arrogant, she hates the spotlight, she dotes on a little rescued dog named Charlie. She is outstandingly good. She is the kind of person you hope your children will be when they grow up, and not because she’s a world-class athlete.

In a few months’ time, this person could well be—by the most objective measure possible—the best soccer player in the history of the world. The possibility of this small, nice fact coming true makes our big and broken world seem a tiny bit less dark, in that way that soccer occasionally can when it fulfills its most noble aspirations.

Because she is who she is, Sinclair hates talking about the record. She sees it as a distraction, something that will mess with her game if she allows herself to think about it. Nonetheless, when reporters ask her about it, which we always do, she is unfailingly polite. As of a few years ago, she would always say that she didn’t know how many goals she had, something everyone around her believes to have been the truth.

Being just six goals away from Wambach, she can no longer block out that knowledge completely. She knows exactly where she stands. When I asked Sinclair if she cared about the record, she took a long pause. “I mean, I think so. I’m this close,” she said. “Yeah, I think it would be, like, a shame not to at this point… Just one of those things that nobody could take away from you.”

Categories
Soccer Thorns

“In the Old World, Everyone Had a Show.”

Something I keep thinking about is how with the world on hold, the sport of soccer finds itself in a limbo state where the real thing has ceased to exist, but there is still a vast archive of past games, existing as a discrete, bounded entity with a series of fixed outcomes. PTFC plans to air some of those past games to fill the time while we all huddle in our houses and wait for things to get better.

The nature of sports—what differentiates them from all other forms of entertainment—is that the result isn’t predetermined. Despite our society’s current fixation on avoiding spoilers in everything we consume, there’s no other medium, if you want to call sports a medium, whose entertainment value depends so heavily on finding out an ending. Arguably, that’s the entire point. Thus, the act of watching soccer has undergone a complete ontological reversal, losing its essential sport-ness. No one has any idea when it might un-reverse.

There’s another medium, Vine, that has existed in this state for some time. Short-form video lives on, but actual vines, scripture-like, are a closed and unchangeable body of work. What’s more, since the platform itself—the “place” they once lived—is dead, their existence is mediated through human memory. What was originally a social and exploratory medium, a place we went to have new things thrust in front of our eyes, is now an archive that can only be navigated if we already know what we’re looking for.

This was never how we were meant to consume Vine, but this state gets at something essential about the form. All vines focus on a single idea, a single joke or visual gag. The best ones can be evoked with a single utterance: “look at all those chickens!” or “back at it again at Krispy Kreme.”

All the countless vines that didn’t gain a foothold in our collective memory? Presumably they exist somewhere as data, but they may as well be gone. There is a vast number of vine compilations on YouTube, and according to the naming conventions of the genre, vines that exist in this purgatory are termed “rare.” I find this a delightful turn of phrase, the way it implies that vines exist in a countable form like Pokémon cards or copies of a printed book.

Similarly, soccer games—not all of them, but the vast majority of all the games that have ever been played—are quickly forgotten, except, maybe, for two or three key moments. We mark the goals down, string together a highlight reel, and move on. There’s no way to search, say, for the time Kelley O’Hara cussed out Hayley Raso, or the time Tobin Heath got a cramp and begged a player on the other team to help her stretch her hamstring. Did those things even happen?

What’s even blurrier is what anything that happens in a soccer game means. We all remember that McCall Zerboni once stepped on Shea Groom as she lay prone on the ground in Providence Park. But why? Does that make her a bad person? What does the step, and our reaction to the step, say about us, or about the people closer to Zerboni?

In this specific sense, both Vine and soccer—especially women’s soccer, with its patchy history, its long stretches of slapdash recordkeeping—are, paradoxically, oral traditions. The data usually exists somewhere, but when a certain critical mass of data piles up, it ceases to perform its intended function of cataloguing events for later reference. The only way to find these things is to ask everyone you know and hope someone remembers.

This can be incredibly frustrating—if you’ve ever written about soccer, you know that a good chunk of the process is often combing through old game footage, looking for one specific moment you remember seeing—but I also find it rather charming. The sport of soccer is, to begin with, a factual event that happens, but in almost equal measure, it’s a thing constituted by our collective memory. Just as you can only play soccer with other people, you can only watch it, in any meaningful sense, with other people.


There’s a play called Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, that I was a little bit obsessed with for a while after I saw it, I think sometime in 2014. It takes place after the end of the known world, but it focuses on something apocalypse fiction usually ignores in favor of scenes of survival and aestheticized brutality, which is the question of how people would entertain themselves in that new reality.

It’s staged in three acts, the first two depicting the same band of survivors. We see them settle around a campfire and retell an episode of The Simpsons (“Cape Feare,” if you care) to pass the time. By the second act, several years later, they’ve become a traveling band of players who make their living staging the show. Over the years, the episode’s dialogue has mutated a little bit; it’s become clear which jokes were good enough to stick in people’s heads. The third act fast-forwards us a few generations into the future, where, after a decades-long game of telephone, America’s favorite yellow family have become the central figures in a quasi-religious musical production evoking Ancient Greek theater.

Once, all entertainment—reality itself, even—functioned this way. Things simply had to be remembered, or they were lost. But even things that were remembered never got remembered perfectly.

Homeric poets, like keepers of oral literary traditions around the world, didn’t memorize and recite epics verbatim—there was no “verbatim” to speak of, just a series of tellings and retellings. Things were half memorized and half improvised; no two poets would sing a given story the same way, and no individual poet would sing exactly the same thing every time. A more skillful poet would add more detail, use more evocative language. They also adjusted to what they thought their audience on any particular day would like (that’s why the Iliad is so packed with the names of characters who only appear long enough to get stabbed in a heroic way—once upon a time, each of those was a shoutout to some rich guy’s legendary eight-times-great-grandfather).

Maybe soccer isn’t quite as different from other forms of entertainment as we think. First and foremost, it’s about an outcome, suspense followed by revelation. That’s why we keep watching, week after week. But that’s not why we love it, I don’t think; we love it because it’s also about creating a collective myth, something that speaks to how we imagine ourselves and to how we imagine other people. In choosing what to remember, we are telling a story about who we are.

Categories
International Soccer Thorns

What Did it Mean? Looking Back at the 2019 World Cup

Ed. note: this story was intended for publication in October 2019. Due to the vagaries of the media business, it never saw the light of day. We hope you’ll enjoy it as you practice social distancing.


France 2019 will be remembered as a big moment for women’s soccer, I think. In its wake, NWSL attendance experienced what looks—tentatively—more like a rising tide than a wave. In Europe, it catalyzed record sponsorships for clubs and leagues. The hype around it is part of what pushed longtime holdouts from the women’s game, including Real Madrid, to throw their hats in the ring. What’s going to be forgotten—what’s always forgotten about World Cups, on either side of the gender divide—is how much of the competition was brutally sad.

Inequality shapes everything about our world, so of course it also shapes the world’s game, much as we like to believe soccer is a sport that rewards talent, nerve, and perseverance above all. The mythos of the sport says that it only takes a ball to play, and that its heroes come from slums and favelas and banlieues.

And all that—it’s not not true, exactly. Fara Williams really was homeless for six years as a teenager. Nadia Nadim really did learn to play soccer while living in a refugee camp. We love those stories, both because they’re inspiring and because they let us believe soccer exists on a more egalitarian and meritocratic plane of being than ordinary life does.

But at a World Cup, where the teams competing run such a complete gamut from good to bad, rich to poor, the truth comes out. Inequality defines the competition. It’s rarely said directly, because it’s not a nice thing to say, but the majority of the field is always teams that stand literally no chance of winning.

As in every other facet of life, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bigger on the women’s side than on the men’s side. Plenty has been written on the subject of the massive and universal underinvestment in the women’s game, so rather than repeating any of that, I will simply say that the spectacle of this sport is something I find increasingly hard to participate in.

The social media zeitgeist takes on a specific tone any time there’s a particularly wild game, every tweet screaming “WHAT IS HAPPENING???” and “OH SHIIIIIT!!” I get that this is fun, and I genuinely take no enjoyment in pointing out that too often, at the World Cup, those moments involve teams beset with dysfunction. Australia-Brazil, which ended 3-2, was one such game—Australia, which fired its head coach less than six months before the tournament, edging out Brazil, whose federation has always chosen to pin its hopes on Marta rather than actually investing in the women’s game. The generational talents who have been let down by this sport’s power structures are far too many to name here.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

I could try to list all the other times this tournament broke my heart: the time France got to retake a penalty because VAR ruled that Nigeria’s keeper came off her line a fraction of a second early, and won the game as a result. The time Argentina, the worst-supported team in the tournament, came back from a three-goal deficit against Scotland only to have their hopes at a win—which would have sent them to the knockout stage—dashed when the referee cut stoppage time short.

But there is one moment that serves as the tragic, surreal nadir of the whole thing: Cameroon-England.

The social contract in sport rests on the mandate that losers must lose gracefully. So when things didn’t go Cameroon’s way against England, their reactionnot just complaining, but raging, crying, fouling left and right, looking like they were about to either start a fight or walk off the field—was more shocking than an upset win would have been.

It was the most bizarre spectacle to have taken place on a soccer field in recent memory, and the English press, especially, was eager to decry it as “DISGRACEFUL” and “SHAMEFUL.” The fact that the perpetrators were women no doubt worsened the shock to delicate sensibilities.

Taking a step back and thinking about the gargantuan disparity between these two soccer teams, though, you almost have to wonder that such displays aren’t more common. England is a team of professionals who play in a competitive league that recently received a £10 million sponsorship from Barclay’s. Meanwhile, the top-tier competition in Cameroon is one that has been described by Cameroonian journalist Njie Enow as “an underfunded domestic championship staged in appalling conditions.” These two teams compete under a common set of rules, but that’s the only parity that exists between them.

And as it does everywhere, sexism amplifies such inequality. Every women’s team is underfunded compared with their male counterparts. Federations spend money on the men hoping that investment will bring success, while women’s teams aren’t even noticed until they start winning—if they’re given a chance to play at all.

What Cameroon did was not sportsmanlike—but one effect of sportsmanship is to provide a glossy cover for the profound unfairness that shapes our world. At some point, we have to look in the mirror and ask why we value the appearance of cooperation and equality more than the conditions of players’ lives—more, in other words, than actual cooperation and equality.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

It is at least counterintuitive, and perhaps simply hypocritical of me, to use that moment, the spiritual low point of the World Cup, as framing for what came next.

Heading into the tournament, I did not know how I was going to feel about the US women, the team that, once upon a time, made me fall in love with this sport. The CONCACAF qualifying tournament back in October was an even bleaker showcase of inequality than the group stage of the World Cup, and if the USWNT’s utter dominance in women’s soccer wasn’t embarrassing enough, you may have noticed that this is not an era when it feels particularly good to be an American.

And then, come the knockout rounds, I found myself rooting for them—not resignedly or out of some sense of obligation, but really, from the depths of my heart, wanting this team to win.

If there’s one strictly soccer-related lesson from France 2019, it’s that the US remains, and likely will remain for some time, the best women’s soccer team in the world. It is not close. They had by far the most challenging schedule of any team, and hardly broke a sweat as they beat both France and England. None of the other supposed contenders—Australia, Germany, Japan—ever looked like possible world champions. There should never have been a question that the US was going to repeat their 2015 victory.

All this, of course, epitomizes the unfairness I spent the first half of this essay detailing. We live in the richest and most powerful country on earth, and our women’s national team is the best-supported in the world. We are Goliath and everyone else is David.

But the reason for that huge disparity doesn’t boil down to a simple question of GDP. Of course it does have to do with that, but it also has to do with the fact that 50 years ago, this country did one small thing right for American women, in passing Title IX, which made it normal for girls to play soccer at a time when that was illegal in many traditional footballing countries.

In simply giving girls the opportunity to play sports, this law converted our huge population into a huge player pool, something you can still see in the USWNT’s incomparable depth: the 2019 roster comfortably contains two full lineups that would be in the top five in the world. That says something about who we are as a country, or at least who we aspire to be. I have never had a lot of patriotic feelings, but I’m proud of that.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a version of earth where women’s soccer is just as popular as men’s, where poverty doesn’t exist, where people can live how they want to live and be who they want to be regardless of where they were born, what they look like, who they love. We do not live in that world. We live in a world where the president of the most powerful country on earth has openly bragged about committing sexual assault.

And in this world, the US women’s national team—the whole institution, but especially this particular US women’s national team—is a rare and special thing. It’s a comfort.

Earlier, I wrote that soccer doesn’t exist on some higher plane where injustice vanishes—and our women’s national team is subject to the coarse vulgarity of sexism and homophobia and racism and everything else. But watching them win the World Cup, it felt like they were above all that.

The 2019 USWNT was the best, on the field, that they have ever been, and I hope it’s not too corny of me to say they were the best off the field, too.

That clip of Megan Rapinoe saying she wasn’t going to the fucking White House? That clip was a month old by the time it blew up on social media. We should never have been talking about it. But so help me, I liked it. The virality of that moment was intentional, and not in a way that benefitted her or her teammates—but she handled it with remarkable grace and composure.

For the first time in their history, this team was not concerned with projecting an image of family-friendly wholesomeness. They swore in public and celebrated with abandon. They were, as a group, incredibly gay. What they projected, instead of the traditional dumbed-down, for-all-the-little-girls-out-there image, was one of strength and outspokenness and pride, as 23 women who play soccer.

Photo by Nikita Taparia

And whatever base stupidity anyone tried to level at them simply bounced off, because they won, and did it in an absolutely clear and irreproachable fashion. Win like that, and you’re untouchable. All the nonsense about the goal celebrations, all memory of our idiot president tweeting at Rapinoe, faded into background noise as they sprayed Budweiser on each other and yelled “I’ma knock the pussy out like fight night!” in unison (it’s a Migos song).

This is the paradox sports present us with. They exist firmly in our mercilessly unfair reality, but at their best, they involve a suspension of disbelief that lets us forget that reality. I hope, without much optimism, that by the next World Cup, our reality might be a little less unfair. But even if it’s not, this tournament is the kind of space that’s much too rare—one where sometimes, good guys win.