The Thorns fell to Chicago on Saturday night in a disappointing 2–1 road loss. It was the two teams’ second and final meeting this NWSL season, and had a very different tone to it than the 5–0 thrashing courtesy of the Thorns to start the season.
There aren’t many words to describe the game besides “un-Thorns-like.” From the whistle, the Thorns seemed to lack pace and the drive to press, and the momentum of the first half was firmly in favor of the Red Stars. The Thorns opened the scoring, but they did so against the run of play, and the instantaneous response from Chicago was emblematic, so let’s break that down.
It’s rare for Bella Bixby to make a major fumble that leads to a goal, but she made several against Chicago. Right before the above still, Bixby had come off her line to collect a cross, but spilled it out of her hands. However, because there were no Thorns following the players making runs into the box, Chicago was able to shoot on an open net. The Thorns outnumbered the Red Stars five to three in the box, and should have been first to the ball.
While it’s important for the defense to be confident in their keeper and listen when they call for the ball (which may or may not have happened—the broadcast was as silent as a golf broadcast), they also need to be covering the open spaces. Inside the box, I would argue that it is much more important to mark a player than it is to mark space, and by not doing this Chicago was able to score an easy tying goal.
In the post-match press conference, Crystal Dunn, Christine Sinclair, and Mark Parsons all had similar sentiments about how the speed Chicago equalized with was a “cardinal sin” and reflected how the half had been going for the team.
Dunn said “the equalizer took the momentum out of us, and it was hard to find it again. We came out of the second half looking to give it everything we had.”
Unfortunately, the Thorns weren’t able to find their rhythm in the second half either. Parsons said that he was “frustrated with the way the team played, both individually and collectively,” saying that coming back from an international break where six players and the head coach were on international duty made it hard to quickly find connections, especially when the first game back was away from home.
At half, the Thorns made three subs, but this triple change may have ended up hindering the connections even more by removing two midfielders and one defender, the areas where the Thorns were struggling most with possession. Let’s take a look at the second goal the Red Stars scored that night.
In this (very poor) screenshot, you can see the Chicago player (Rachel Hill) is closer to the goal than the Thorns player (Meghan Klingenberg?), allowing her to easily get the header that results in the point. Even though there are far more white shirts than black ones on the screen, what really matters is backtracking fast enough to get goalside.
The buildup came from a cross that the Red Stars were able to get off with relatively little pressure. The lack of shutting down space was a common trend for the Thorns throughout the game. Normally the team with the strongest midfield, the Thorns were outplayed and exploited, and were unable to gain the momentum the second half.
One thing that is curious is that even though the Thorns walked away feeling disappointed in their outcome and performance, the stats show a different story. They had 59% possession and 396 accurate passes, 150 more than the Red Stars made. The Thorns’ accuracy was also 79% compared to Chicago’s 71%. So, what went wrong?
The Thorns’ identity, which they have been cultivating all season, relies on a high press and building up out of the back, neither of which they were able to accurately employ during the game. The two midfielders who played 90 minutes, Dunn and Angela Salem, actually had more touches than they did against North Carolina, but like possession, that’s another statistic that yielded little in the way of results. Unable to be playmakers, the midfield was dimmed and couldn’t connect the backline and the forwards.
When the tactical numbers are still high, questions of mentality begin to arise. Here, Parsons says that the team was having a hard time mentally, as they were “unable to find a way when things weren’t going as planned.”
Despite the unexpected outcome, the Thorns are optimistic going forward, knowing they have a full week of training with the entire team ahead of them. The time at home and together can only benefit the team both mentally and physically, as they find time to recharge and reconnect with one another on the field.
After the game, Sinc speculated that the team bus catching on fire last week may have been a bad omen. Hopefully this week is fire-free.
Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
In 2015, Meghan Klingenberg was a standout with the US national team. At the World Cup that year, she started every game for a back line that conceded just three goals—including a Julie Ertz own goal—all tournament. She had a moment in the spotlight with a dramatic goal-line save against Sweden to rescue a clean sheet. There was no reason to suspect the 26-year-old would be on the bubble just over a year later.
But that’s exactly what happened. At the beginning of 2018, Kling was dropped for good, with little noise and less ceremony. That’s what happens when you get cut. There’s no party. One day you’re there, the next you’re not.
“It was really hard,” she remembers. “I had a lot of bitterness about it.”
The story of Kling’s break from the national team wasn’t fully told at the time. In 2016, after the Americans’ ill-fated Olympics run, she suffered a back injury, which the USWNT staff identified as a pulled muscle. In fact, it was a more severe injury that required surgery, and the misdiagnosis set her recovery timeline back significantly.
After recovering from surgery, Kling set about getting back to her 2015 form. She made a strong case for herself in the 2017 Thorns season, establishing herself as a key piece in the offense—a role she still plays today. She notched seven assists that season, the third-most in the league after Kristie Mewis and Nahomi Kawasumi; she was the only defender to record more than three. At the end of that season, the Thorns won the championship.
Photo by Matthew Wolfe
But she never really worked her way back into the national team conversation. From an outsider’s perspective, what’s especially baffling—insulting, frankly—is the lengths the team went to in their search for outside backs leading up to the 2019 World Cup.
Jill Ellis’s staff tried converting Sofia Huerta, a failed experiment that nonetheless prompted Huerta to move from the Red Stars to the Dash; they gave famous homophobe Jaelene Daniels (née Hinkle) a second chance after she’d refused to play in a Pride Month jersey. For their part, the stans—many of them, anyway—wanted Ali Krieger back in the picture and howled for blood every time she was left out of a lineup. We all know how the search ended: with Crystal Dunn, one of the most dangerous attacking players in the world, becoming a locked-in starter at left back.
All that happened because the foregone conclusion, before she’d even had the chance to recover fully, was that Kling’s time was over.
That was a blow. “It felt unfair to not be given a chance with the national team, knowing that I had this injury that they had misdiagnosed for a long time,” she remembers. It’s one thing to get fired because you messed up; it’s another to get punished for someone else’s mistake.
“I could not find joy in the game. I was just playing to get back to where I was.”
Zen master Dongshan Liangjie of Mount Dong said to the assembly, “Experience going beyond Buddha and say a word.”
A monastic asked him, “What is saying a word?”
Dongshan said, “When you say a word, you don’t hear it.”
The monastic said, “Do you hear it?”
Dongshan said, “When I am not speaking, I hear it.”
But that was then. Times have changed.
“I guess the only way that I can put it is that the past doesn’t exist, and the future isn’t real.”
I’m talking to Kling in the stands at Providence Park on a warm day in August. We both have masks on; hers is gray plaid with a Pittsburgh Steelers logo. 2015 was a lifetime ago. Longer—a different plane of existence. The whole Trump administration sits between now and then.
“All we have right now,” she continues, “is this moment right here in front of us. And we get to choose what we want to do with it. If we want to be distracted and not be here, present, we can choose to do that… I think when we choose presence, a lot of other things happen because of that.”
For Kling, this wasn’t an easy lesson to learn. It’s not a mindset that comes easily to professional athletes, for whom performance matters, and hypercompetitiveness is a job requirement. But excellence is paradoxical: the more you fixate on results—on the free kick you whiffed or the bad day you had in training—the less you focus on the process of getting the results. A focus on winning turns into a fear of losing. That fear plagued her, even as she remained a key player for the Thorns through 2018 and 2019.
“I was one of the most outcome-driven athletes that you could find, before I had this kind of paradigm shift,” she says. “And it just wasn’t working for me anymore. I was having all kinds of anxiety, three quarters of a month. I was having trouble physically breathing, because I was having so much anxiety about how I’m going to play, how I’m going to do, what happened last game, all these different things.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
In early 2020, something snapped. “I was just like, so tired,” Kling remembers, “of having anxiety all the time, worrying about the next game. My body would get tight when I’d play, then I’d relax for a few days, and then it would build, build, build. It was like, 10 years of that.”
Through a friend, she got in touch with a performance coach named Jason Goldsmith, whose core philosophy is to teach athletes to focus on the things they can control and let go of the things they can’t. “[Whether] you win or lose, or if you play well, or statistically do well, all of those things, you know, are not something that’s controllable,” Goldsmith says.
Even the best players in the world miss tackles and hoof shots over the bar. As a defender, sometimes you can save the day, and other times you have to go one-on-one againstLynn Williams.“What is controllable,” Goldsmith says, “is, how do you feel when you are playing?”
One tool he uses with athletes is a biofeedback device called a FocusBand, a wearable EEG that connects to a smart phone and allows the user to directly monitor their brain activity.“The benefit of having something like that,” he explains, “that gives you direct feedback, [is that it] allows you to explore different meditation practices in a way that you can see, ‘oh, when I do this, when I focus on this, this is how it’s affecting my brainwave frequency. Or if I do this, this really doesn’t work.’”
In Taoism and Zen Buddhism, one goal of meditation is to enter a state of mushin, or “no-mindedness.” It’s a state of complete engagement in an activity—whether that activity is meditating or kicking a soccer ball—without thought or judgment.
“If you had the device on and you were thinking about how to play,” Goldsmith explains, “you’re no longer playing.”
That state of mind, sometimes called “flow,” is an indispensable toolfor athletes, or anyone doing a high-skill task that requires intense concentration.It also has a neural fingerprint that the FocusBand can pick up on. For Kling, Goldsmith sewed the device into a hat, so she could wear it throughout the day. Using the band as part of a daily mindfulness practice, she transformed her outlook.
“Sometimes we go to the grocery store, right,” she explains, “and we’re standing in lines waiting. But what are we waiting for? We’re waiting for the future.” The future, though—as we’ve already discussed—doesn’t exist. At some point, Kling realized, “I don’t need to wait. I can just be.”
That shift helped her reconceptualize the game of soccer. “When I first got [to Portland], it was all about outcomes. How do I make 100% passing, how do I create the most chances? How do I stop the most one-v-ones, all these different things. And I would just data myself to death.”
By shifting her focus away from outcomes, Kling says, “everything slowed down.” Instead of thinking about completing passes or chances, or winning the ball back in specific moments, “I just think about it in terms of space. How do I get my body and this ball into this area? Instead of seeing defenders running at me, or where my players are running, I more see everything at once.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
The excellence paradox works in reverse, too. Not worrying about the numbers hasenabled Kling to improve her numbers. So far this season, she has a 78.5% pass completion rate, about 5% more than she had in 2019, a 43.9% long pass completion rate—a 10% improvement—and is attempting about 57 passes per game, compared to 43 in 2019.
“For [Dōgen], each moment of practice encompasses enlightenment, and each moment of enlightenment encompasses practice. In other words, practice and enlightenment—process and goal—are inseparable. The circle of practice is complete even at the beginning. This circle of practice-enlightenment is renewed moment after moment.”
–Kazuaki Tanahashi, Enlightenment Unfolds
Kling’s journey over the last three years parallels that of the Thorns as a team. “[In] ‘16 and ‘17, we were very, very focused on the process,” Mark Parsons says. What he means by “process” is a relentless focus on getting better as a group, according to an abstract vision of the kind of team they want to be, rather than numbers of wins and losses. Train well, work hard, strive for improvement, and the results will follow, the reasoning goes. “‘18, ‘19, I think we got—I got—distracted with the outcome,” he says.
It sounds a little absurd to say there was something wrong with a team’s approach in two seasons when they went to the league championship and the playoff semifinal, respectively, but within the team, something had soured. The Thorns want and expect to be the best, and with their resources, there’s little excuse not to be.
From the outside, nothing seemed particularly amiss during that time. You had to know what to look for: a player reporting late for uncertain reasons, a vague disjointedness and a whiff of frustration in the attack. The team’s culture issues came to a head at the 2019 semifinal at Chicago, when Caitlin Foord, Midge Purce, and Hayley Raso started on the bench. After the 1–0loss, AD Franch alluded to internal fracture, saying the team needed to “regroup, find our culture, and get back to who we are.”
Some of that was a personnel issue; too many players, regardless of quality, weren’t bought into Parsons’s vision for the team. The club cleaned house over the offseason and brought in the likes of Rocky Rodríguez, Sophia Smith, and Morgan Weaver. At least as important was that the coaching staff took a long look in the mirror and realized they’d strayed from their core values.
Effort is the first of those values. But that’s hardly unique, either when looking to Parsons teams of past years—if I had a nickel for every time I’d recorded him talking about “maximum effort,” I’d have, well, quite a few nickels—or when you think about the whole edifice of team sports, especially in this country.
What’s new for this version of the Thorns is the striking literalness with which they apply their stated values. You don’t have to speak with anyone on the team to know this; you can see it on the field. They want to improve at one specific style of play, so they use the same basic game plan every week, regardless of personnel.
Most teams, including the Portland of two or three years ago, line up different ways in different situations, moving to a back three or employing a different pressing scheme to fill in the gaps when certain players weren’t available. Now there is one plan, with clearly defined roles at every position, which every player on the roster knows like the back of their hand.
Photo by Nikita Taparia
The goal is to win. But they see winning as a long-term goal, not an immediate one. Winning this week is one thing. They want to win the league.
“If we live the rollercoaster of winning and losing and tying with the ball going in or the ball not going in,” Parsons says, “we’re just a team that defines ourselves by outcome. But medium- and long-term success isn’t decided by outcome. It’s about improvement.” Control the controllables, and the rest will fall into place.
Parsons and Kling both use the 2020 Challenge Cup as an illustration.
“We went into the COVID Cup in 2020 and came in last in the preliminary stages,” Kling says. “But that’s because we were so beholden to our mission, we were so beholden to the process, that we were not going to change what we were going to do just to get results. I know that really bothered a lot of people, but it didn’t bother us.”
“We all knew we were on a different journey,” Parsons says.
When Buddha was in Grdhrakuta mountain he turned a flower in his fingers and held it before his listeners. Every one was silent. Only Maha-Kashapa smiled at this revelation, although he tried to control the lines of his face.
Buddha said: “I have the eye of the true teaching, the heart of Nirvana, the true aspect of non-form, and the ineffable stride of Dharma. It is not expressed by words, but especially transmitted beyond teaching. This teaching I have given to Maha-Kashapa.
“I had to realize that life wasn’t fair,” Kling says.
Unfairness—along with pain, loss, and regret—are inevitable. What we can change is how we react.In Buddhism, the cause of suffering is not what happens to us, but the way we push back internally against it. You can be bitter forever, or you can learn to let go.
The idea of getting back to where she was—back to her 2015 form, back to the national team—took some time for Kling to let go of. “But,” she says now, “there’s no getting back to where I was, and why would I want to anyway? Why would I want to go back in the past when I could take all of that information and use it now, and be a totally different player, be a player that I want to be?”
Arguably, she’s better now than she was then. She’s having the club season of her career. More important, she’s found joy in the game again. As she said in a press conference during the 2021 Challenge Cup, “I’m literally having a fucking blast right now.”
Photo by Nikita Taparia
“I’ll tell [friends and family] stories that happened in practice,” she says, “and they’re like, ‘do you ever practice? All I hear about is you laughing, all I hear about is you telling these crazy-ass stories!’ And I’m like, ‘yeah, well, we do that the entire practice. All I do is laugh and play hard, the whole practice.’ I love that, because to me, joy is one of the main drivers of me getting better. When I’m laughing and having fun with my friends, I know that I’m fully tuned in to exactly what we’re doing.”
She sees the pressure, the anxiety, the feelings of inadequacy she long struggled with in other elite athletes. It’s getting more common for athletes, many of them women—Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, Christen Press—to pull out of competitions for mental and emotional injuries in addition to physical ones.
Those injuries are complex and often rooted in off-field trauma, but to the extent that competition itself exacerbates them, Kling says, “I personally feel like we’ve let these women down. We never taught them that competition should be joyful. We never taught them to be just content with exactly who [they] are.”
“All I want for them is to be able to step up onto the biggest stage of their lives, knowing that they have done everything that they can possibly do to get to that moment, and enjoy it.”
Thorns players pose with Nabisco workers. Photo by Margaret Seiler.
Workers at the Mondelez International bakery in Northeast Portland have been striking August 10 due to a contract dispute with their employer, which wants a contract that includes longer shifts, cuts to overtime pay, and higher health insurance premiums. Nabisco/Mondelez employees in Illinois, Georgia, Colorado, and Virginia soon also walked off the job, and the Portland workers have been joined on the picket line by a variety of other unions, including longshoremen, railroad workers, machinists, and painters.
Today, they added one more union to that list: the NWSL Players’ Association.
A group of Thorns players, including Emily Menges, Marissa Everett, Morgan Weaver, Madison Pogarch, Simone Charley, Bella Bixby, Christen Westphal, Abby Smith, Yazmeen Ryan, and Taylor Porter, picketed in solidarity with the bakery workers along NE Columbia Blvd, holding signs reading “solidarity” and “scabs go home,” and chanting slogans like “no justice, no treats!” and “no contract, no snacks, Portland has the bakers’ backs!”
Emily Menges takes a turn with the bullhorn. Photo by Margaret Seiler.
“I just think it’s important that we show up for other members of the community who are fighting the same fight that we’re currently fighting,” said Menges. “We know right from wrong, and this is wrong.”
The union is in talks with management in Baltimore today, their third meeting since May, but the workers’ grievances go back further than that. “The company for a number of years, has been doing everything they can to try to break the union,” said Mike Burlingham, vice president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) Local 364, which represents the workers. “They’re not coming in to negotiate. They’re coming in with their list of demands.”
Burlingham said the company has yet to make any official offers, and has instead tried to negotiate directly with workers, which is illegal in a unionized workplace. They also brought in scabs from out of town to keep the bakery running while the union members strike.
“The company’s proposal is, they want to set up a two-tier medical plan for us, to create divide within the union,” said Burlingham. Essentially, the proposed plan would mean newer employees would pay higher premiums. “That’s called eating our young, and we don’t do that. And the other thing is, they want to move our eight-hour shifts to 12-hour shifts and change the language of how we get paid overtime.”
“Greed is the problem here, with Mondelez,” said Victor Weekes, a retired worker who now acts as a union representative. “And respect. Mondelez don’t respect the people that work.”
BCTGM representative Victor Weekes talks to Thorns players. Photo by Margaret Seiler.
Professional soccer is a very different job from working a factory floor, but workers’ rights are workers’ rights. “I think that we can’t really look at ourselves as like a group of a group of workers that are going through anything new,” said Bixby. “I think that it’s on us to line ourselves up with other workers that are going through labor struggles as well.”
“The details and everything are different—we’re not fighting for pensions, we’re not fighting for that kind of stuff—but just the fair treatment of humans,” said Menges. The NWSLPA is also currently negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the league, but “for today,” she continued, “we are less focused on what we’re doing and more focused on what they’re trying to accomplish.”
The players’ presence on the picket line was not a Thorns-specific effort, but a gesture on behalf of the whole NWSLPA. “The PA’s been watching what’s been going on with these Nabisco workers pretty much all over the country,” she said. “It just so happened that one of the factories that went on strike is in Portland, and that was the only location that [players] plausibly could have gone to and supported them.”
“I think it’s important that we and other people in the community come and show support, just because I hope that it is taken seriously by their employer,” said Bixby. “I hope that ongoing support by a lot of different groups and a lot of different people helps them take it seriously.”
Seeing the Thorns stand in solidarity with the bakery workers “means the world to me,” said Burlingham. “Them showing up and showing their support is so meaningful to us. Players of that caliber, and the platform that they have and the attention that they can bring to this, it’s phenomenal.”
Striking Nabisco/Mondelez workers. Photo by Katelyn Best.
A number of the striking workers are Thorns fans, and several people giddily posed for photos with the players; one woman admitted to me she was too shy to ask for a photo. Weekes is a big Timbers fan, and his son has Thorns season tickets. If the Thorns are in the championship in November, he said with a grin, he’d be there.
All the Nabisco workers I spoke to agreed that spirits are high. “All the support we get,” said Chrysta Knutson, a packing shop steward with Local 364, “it gives me so much motivation and encouragement, and it just keeps my morale up.”
“It takes it takes a whole community, and in this case, an entire nation, because this is a nationwide strike,” said Burlingham. “It’s going to take an entire nation to stand up and say, what’s going on isn’t right… And until that time, boycott Nabisco, boycott Mondelez.”
Some reporting was contributed by Margaret Seiler.
The Thorns recorded their first ever win away against the Courage on Sunday. The game was touted as a “top of the table clash,” and Kelli Hubly said afterward that “rivalry between the Courage and the Thorns might be bigger than that against the Reign” because both teams have won multiple NWSL titles. Despite the 1-0 scoreline and the Thorns’s 2-0 loss in Cary earlier this year, Portland dictated the tempo from the beginning and dominated in shots, possession, and passing.
The Courage didn’t look as threatening as they have previously this season—they were unbeaten in their last seven games—and weren’t able to get many shots off. While this could be attributed to internal issues and player turnover on the team, the Thorns’s midfield have to get credit for effectively pressing and shutting down North Carolina’s box midfield.
In the above image (Thorns are moving left to right), it’s easy to see how much space the diamond midfield had. Angela Salem has the ball in the center of the pitch, and she has several easy passes to choose between. There are four Courage players within about a 10-yard radius, all of whom are behind the play. She chooses to play it forward to Crystal Dunn, who holds the ball and feeds it through for Sophia Smith to go 1v1 on goal.
Due to the fact that the Thorns can never seem to have all their forwards healthy at the same time, Christine Sinclair has transitioned into playing the No. 9 striker role since she returned from the Olympics. This switch allows Crystal Dunn to slide forward play the No. 10 center attacking mid, where she’s been more successful than she was in the deeper midfield positions in the diamond. Here, she is able to be a playmaker. With 50 touches and 76% passing accuracy, Dunn was an effective link between Sinclair and Smith up top and the midfield. The combination of those lines allowed the Thorns to outshoot the Courage 23-11.
In this image (Thorns are moving right to left), you can see Portland’s midfield holding their wider shape—as they did throughout the game—and consistently beating out the Courage’s. Lindsey Horan (bottom middle) plays the ball centrally, and Rocky Rodríguez is able to easily receive it. Due to the high press and wide shape, Rodríguez has several options to keep the ball moving around North Carolina.
The strength and consistency of the midfield against North Carolina is an example of the “Thorns mentality”—a phrase that players and coach Mark Parsons have repeated throughout the season. After the game, Parsons said they “want to be constantly improving and playing as a team because that will push [the team] towards [their] best.” He shouted out Dunn and Salem as two players who exemplified that mindset. As the last third of the seasons approaches, the Thorns will look to build on the consistency and success they have begun to expect.
Sophia Smith, tied for most goal on the Thorns with Charley, has been an example of the Thorns’ mentality. Staying with the Thorns all summer has been the ideal opportunity to get consistent minutes, and I don’t think I can say enough good things about Smith’s recent form. Against North Carolina, she had eight shots, a mere three fewer than the entire Courage team, with five on target. Probability says that if you shoot enough, one is bound to go in, but that statement cheapens Smith’s goal. Sinclair played a perfectly-weighted ball over the top, and Smith slipped between the two Courage center backs to go to goal. Seeing that Murphy was off her line, Smith knew she couldn’t take unnecessary touches, or Murphy would get the ball.
In this still, right before Smith struck the ball, Smith’s body is facing toward the left hand side of the goal. However, she doesn’t go there. Reading the keeper well, Smith strikes the ball with the outside of her right foot, sending it to the near post and catching Murphy off-balance.
Smith leads the entire league in shots, and while she isn’t consistent yet on her conversion rates, her ability to read the game and control her body allows her to score at crucial moments. Goals like the one in Sunday’s game are not an accident or a statistic probability; they are well-intentioned. As Smith continues to grow into the league, she will become even more lethal.
Also of note, it was good to see Tyler Lussi back on the field after so long out! Hopefully Simone Charley can come back soon because the Thorns’s front line will truly be frightening with all forwards fit.
Portland now heads off on international break, with the six players called up by their national teams joined by Mark Parsons as he officially begins coaching the Dutch National Team.
The Thorns fell 1–2 to their rivals from the north on Sunday. It was an exciting game that may be remembered as the moment the Reign completed their transformation into the superteam they’ve looked like on paper since the arrivals of Dzsenifer Maroszán, Rose Lavelle, and Eugenie Le Sommer.
Back under our old friend Laura Harvey and playing for the first time ever at the Seahawks’s Lumen Field, the Reign employed a clever game plan that both maximized their strengths and capitalized on the weaknesses in Portland’s setup.
Let’s take a look at the Reign’s first goal, which exemplifies both sides of that equation. In the screenshot below, Portland has just won possession off a Reign goal kick, and Maroszán is chasing Lindsey Horan, limiting her passing options:
Horan’s options on the left side of the field are cut off; most players would also see the passing lane to Rocky Rodríguez, in the center circle, as being blocked by Rose Lavelle, leaving Christen Westphal on the right as the only option. She’s wide open, too! But whether it’s because Horan isn’t at 100% mentally—she hasn’t looked like she’s quite clicked back into place with the team in the last couple games—or because she’s Lindsey Horan and has completed this pass plenty of times, she opts for Rodríguez. Lavelle scoops up the pass, Maroszán and Jess Fishlock close in, and Fishlock finds Megan Rapinoe sprinting up the Reign’s left wing:
Clearly, the Thorns are in big trouble now. Westphal and Natalia Kuikka were both pushing forward, leaving tons of space behind them. At this moment, Kuikka is dropping back but has to keep her eye on Le Sommer on the right, while Westphal is miles behind Pinoe, so Emily Menges and Becky Sauerbrunn are left in the lurch. Menges is left guarding Pinoe one on one, and that’s the ballgame.
Portland’s defense found themselves resorting to heroics a number of times in the game, as the Reign took advantage of that wide space. They also cleverly deployed Maroszán in a false No. 9 role, using her to press the Thorns’ deeper-lying players on defense and then combine with the midfield once her team won the ball. She was effective both with her pressing, as we saw above, and as a creator, notching two chances created on the stat sheet.
Defensively, Tacoma aimed to make the center of the field as claustrophobic as possible for Portland’s dangerous midfield. They used a low line of engagement, generally not pressing above the halfway line, but pestered the Thorns midfield aggressively in their own half. Here it also has to be said that the current Reign midfield of Fishlock, Lavelle, and Quinn—plus Maroszán, in practice—rivals the Thorns’ for the best in the league. Fishlock, obviously, eats nails for breakfast, Quinn is a gold medal-winning No. 6, and Lavelle is demonstrating she can be a destroyer in addition to an offensive wizard. In short: a formidable trio!
OL also tended to stay compact horizontally, the better to crowd the central midfield. In doing that, they often ignored the Thorns’ outside backs as they pushed forward in the attack. That left Kuikka and Westphal (and anyone else who found themselves wide of the goal area) open to send in crosses, but with the Reign defense packed in tight as Portland tended to be slow to find those options, only one cross out of 18 total found its mark.
This is where things get a little more nuanced. No doubt this was one of Portland’s poorer performances this year, but I also think it was a closer match than a 2–1 scoreline would imply. The defensive strategy I just outlined, like all defensive strategies, had some vulnerabilities. In particular, pressing always opens up space somewhere on the field, and in Tacoma’s case, that space was between their midfield and back line, which is quite a dangerous area of the field to leave space in!
Below, Angela Salem has just won the ball off of Kristen McNabb (I think) and tapped it to the white area that I think is Rodríguez, who is about to find Crystal Dunn in a big comfortable pocket ahead of the Reign defense:
After this, Fishlock and Quinn kept following the ball as the Thorns passed it around, Sophia Smith and Christine Sinclair stretched the OL back line, and Smith ended up with a clear shot at the goal—which she sent straight to Sarah Bouhaddi.
Smith had a handful of similar chances where the Reign midfield’s aggressive orientation toward the ball came back to bite them, ending the game with a team-leading six shots. In other words, the space was there, the Thorns were just too slow and inconsistent in recognizing and capitalizing on it.
That particular chance was a microcosm of Portland’s issues as a whole. A number of players, including Rodríguez and Menges, looked gassed from the starting whistle. This team has had an exhausting schedule in August, playing five games in 16 days. Smith in particular, though, seemed to exemplify what Mark Parsons identified postgame as the real fallout of that schedule.
“Physically I thought, some of the players today, they still looked like they could go,” he said. “But mentally, definitely. Mentally and emotionally, there was a little more in the tank for them, a little less in the tank for us.”
We’ve seen Smith struggle with finishing this season, but from the press box at least, this looked like a slightly different issue. Where in the past, she’s sometimes seemed to be overthinking where to place the ball once she gets in on goal, on Sunday she tended to find those chances and just… kick.
This isn’t to single Smith out—the team was a beat slow across the board, and understandably so. The full week of rest and training ahead is sorely needed, and hopefully the Thorns emerge looking more like themselves.
In what Mark Parsons called the “toughest game of [their] intense five-game streak,” the Thorns came away with all three points against Gotham FC last night. Last night’s game was the fourth meeting of the Thorns and Gotham this year, and marked their second win (the other two were ties).
Fresh off their ICC win, the Thorns marketed the game as the homecoming of their Olympians. It was bittersweet to not see AD Franch welcomed back to Providence Park alongside Crystal Dunn, Lindsey Horan, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Christine Sinclair, but that’s business. Parsons wasted no time in slotting the Olympians back into the starting XI, even if that meant deploying them in different positions from their usual. Sinc played the attacking No. 9 instead of her normal distributing role as the No. 10, where Dunn played instead.
To the eye, the Thorns dominated the first half, attacking relentlessly. The numbers told a somewhat different story. While the Thorns did outshoot Gotham 15–1 with seven shots on target, they were only able to score once in the run of play. Postgame, Parsons said he was disappointed that they hadn’t put more of their many opportunities. The lack of goals resulted from misplaced or overshot passes in the final third, where players took one too many touches or played the ball behind a player who was open on goal.
And despite their overall dominance, there were moments where the team looked a little disjointed. Their passing accuracy was only 75%, and they completed 200 passes, 100 less than Gotham did. With more time back, I expect these numbers to rise, but it will be difficult to find the cohesion the Thorns experienced during the Olympic window with victory tours and national team camps expected to take players out.
Horan, in her first 90-minute appearance for the Thorns since the July 11th game against Gotham, put in a solid shift. She did have a few noticeable mistakes, like early in the first half, when she received the ball unmarked at the top of the 18 and passed it behind Sophia Smith instead of opting to shoot, sending the ball out of play. However, Horan ended the match with the most touches (68), and an above-average passing accuracy of 80%. That she did so well statistically despite struggling to find teammates at certain moments points to how much more dominant this midfield can be when all the Olympians are fully reintegrated.
While individual players may have been off their rhythms at times, the team as a whole knew their job and were successful in keeping a high press. Parsons spoke about how during the Olympic window the Thorns kept their integrity and didn’t change how they played just because half their starters were gone. Gotham started the match in a 3-5-2, attempting to clog the midfield lanes, but the Thorns’ high press was able to overwhelm their formation.
As you can see on the passing map below, Smith, Dunn, and Sinc all pressed high, and were able to find themselves in 1v1 situations with the Gotham defenders.
Credit: Antonio Maza
Rocky Rodríguez and Angela Salem were able to find them with balls over the top, bypassing the overcrowded midfield, which is where many of the Thorns’ shots came from.
The passing map also shows how crucial Salem was as the No. 6. In 65 minutes, she had two key passes and was 100% on accurate long balls, making 28 completed passes. Her distribution helped to connect the back line to the forwards and work the ball around Gotham, exploiting the available space. Salem is a true No. 6, the deepest midfielder, and was replaced by Moultrie, who is still finding her footing and which position she’s most comfortable in. Without a dedicated holding midfielder, the midfield lost its shape, causing most of the play to go through Horan on the left side.
This shift forced Yazmeen Ryan to drop back, not able to press nearly as high as Sophia had. These subtle changes resulted in a significant decrease in shots taken, with only five in the second half, and led to “poor buildup, pressing, and fatigue” as Parsons said postgame. The Thorns’ 40.8% possession shows that although they’re dangerous, last night didn’t quite represent their full potential, and they continue to lose focus as games reach the 70th minute.
Sophia Smith deserves a shoutout, too. In the half she played, she was one of the most dangerous players on the pitch. Parsons said that her not making the Olympic roster, while heartbreaking, was ultimately one of the best things for her as a Thorn, as it provided the consistency she needs to grow. With 100% passing accuracy and three shots on target, she was lethal up top, slicing apart Gotham’s back line and beating players on the dribble, including Erika Skroski, whose ankles she destroyed to get her goal.
Postgame, Smith said she has been working on her off-ball runs, and that work is showing results. As she gets more time to grow (she is only 21, as the commentators never fail to remind us), she will develop into one of the most lethal threats in the league.
The Thorns go again against the Reign on Saturday, and while there isn’t much time to prepare, hopefully the rhythm and connection between the Olympic players and the team will grow, leading to a game that is equally dominant to the eye and on paper.
In the opening games of the WICC at Providence Park yesterday, Lyon played beat Barcelona 3–2 in an exciting, high-quality match. Later in the evening, the Portland Thorns played the Houston Dash to a 2-2 tie. The match went to penalties, and the Thorns came out on top, beating Houston 3–1 in the shootout.
But I come to you bringing observations of the 90+ minutes of each game, whether you were cheering for Lyonnais, Barcelona, the Thorns, or the Dash.
FC Barcelona vs Olympique Lyonnais
1. Olympique Lyonnais made the most of their back line while countering. With Barça disorganized defensively after attacking, and some of their players spread out to follow their marks, OL opened up to find space immediately, and their back line sent passes up wide or through the middle. This tactic was used in one of Lyon’s attempts on goal late in the first half, which nearly succeeded. Barça’s defense was often unprepared and didn’t anticipate the sudden switch of speed.
2. Barça used their midfield and attacking third to send crosses through Lyon’s defensive line whenever they were caught flat, which happened often during the first half. Lyon was slow to counter at times, allowing Barça to move in for crosses and runs. Because Lyon’s defensive line was often so flat, they were caught having to rush back on defense to adjust for an incoming shot or pass.
3. The two teams’ ball movement differed visibly. Lyon used fluid movement switching from one side to the other and using passes and runs up the sidelines, while Barça attacked more centrally, sending passes straight through the middle, as well as using many more crosses. That difference was pivotal to the result of the game. Lyon’s passes and runs from wide areas helped spread out Barça’s defense and created gaps to allow Lyon players through their lines. On the other end, Barça’s crosses helped them move the ball efficiently when Lyon’s own defense was slow to recover and drop back.
Photo by Matthew Wolfe
Portland Thorns vs Houston Dash
1. Early on, Portland’s starters struggled with their movement around the field, but gradually settled in as the game continued. The beginning of the match was a little messy, and it took me longer than usual to analyze the teams’ formations and movement, and to gain an understanding of how the two teams were approaching their opponent. As the game progressed, however, the Thorns’ movement improved. Some players started to switch sides to get into more comfortable positions and to confuse any defenders marking them. Forwards Sophia Smith and Taylor Porter, for example, often switched sides. After some of the chaos settled, the Thorns worked their way into the game.
2. The Houston Dash used the width of the field to pressure the Thorns centrally. The Thorns’ 4-1-2-1-2 formation meant they had a lot of players in the central midfield and were able to push several players forward when needed. With the center crowded with Thorns players, Houston had to find an alternative to breaking Portland’s defensive lines. They used the wings on offense, but used their own defensive line to pressure the center of the field and prevent Thorns attackers from getting chances centrally and in Houston’s box.
3. Subs from the Thorns at the beginning of the second half changed things up. With the Dash leading 2–0, a change was needed to at least catch up to the Dash. When Emily Menges, Simone Charley, and Hannah Betfort joined the fray, Charley’s speed meant counter attacks were in order. Bringing the ball forward for attacks more often led to more and more scoring opportunities, including corners—one of which gave the Thorns their first goal.
A lot of good things that I liked happened last night. Here is a list of the best things that happened, in my opinion:
1. Seven total hype reels throughout the evening
2. Barcelona playing in a super-organized possession-based style, which I would bet not a huge amount of money, but some money, that no team has ever done in Providence Park before
3. Wendie Renard (tall)
4. Mariona goals (two)
5. When Amandine Henry scored in the North End
Photo by Matthew Wolfe
6. Melvine Malard goal
7. The ideal combo of sophistication and technical prowess, on the one hand, and yakety sax defensive errors on the other; maybe the best soccer game I’ve ever seen in person
9. When the Thorns rotated as much of the team as possible because the same 15ish players have been doing everything for like a month and a half, they’ve been on the road two weeks in a row, and the team has four games in the space of 12 days, so a bunch of players got their first starts and minutes
10. When Natalia Kuikka scored with her head after telling her roommate Angela Salem she was going to score with her head
Before the game: Natu – “Ang, I’m going to score with my head today.” Me – “alright, yeah you are!” Natu – “I’m going to celebrate with you when I do.” Game begins…@nataliakuikka scores a header. Can’t make this up people!!! Love my roomie ❤️
11. When Olivia Moultrie did a direct free kick and it went in the goal, it was still cool even though the Houston keeper should have been able to save it
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After this, Fishlock and Quinn kept following the ball as the Thorns passed it around, Sophia Smith and Christine Sinclair stretched the OL back line, and Smith ended up with a clear shot at the goal—which she sent straight to Sarah Bouhaddi.
