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.
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