The Thorns held on for the three points on Sunday in a match featuring Simone Charley’s second regular season goal (!!), 80% fan capacity at Providence Park (!!), and some very warm weather for a late June Portland afternoon.
Here are a couple of my takeaways from the game:
1. A turning point, of sorts
I’ve talked a lot about the Thorns and missed chances this year, and I think this game was (hopefully) a turning point in that regard. It’s not that Portland did an especially good job on capitalizing on their chances—they recorded 20 shots on the afternoon, with only one goal to show for it—and it’s weird to say this match marked a shift right before five players step away from the team for the Olympics.
Still, I think Mark Parsons said it best when asked about Christine Sinclair’s missed penalty after the match:
“I think the team were excellent because we missed chances. I think we missed three or four chances that we should score. And I thought, in other games that could affect our decisions. OL Reign or Orlando, when we went through that period, a decision starts to get a bit more desperate, and we were starting to force things or take things on early or not play as fluid, as free in our decision making. I thought it was the opposite today.”
It doesn’t hurt that Simone Charley was the one who scored, either—both because she had the most good looks on goal of any player in the first half and because she’ll still be around through Olympic absences.
“For me personally, it was great to be able to get a goal and use that as momentum going into the Olympic break,” Charley said. “I think you got a taste of seeing how deep our team is, so I’m pretty excited for these upcoming weeks.”
2. 2019 flashbacks, anyone?
I hope I’m not the only one who saw Sunday’s lineup and immediately thought of the last time Sinc played as a dual No. 9 for the Thorns—specifically alongside Tobin Heath in Portland’s Very Weird last two games of 2019.
Fortunately, things were different this time around. Parsons said Tyler Lussi, Sophia Smith, and Morgan Weaver were all dealing with small injuries going into the match, and Charley had taken some time off during the international break for personal reasons.
(It was probably less fortunate for Elizabeth Ball—both in terms of her team losing the match and in terms of being on the receiving end of an interesting yellow card for “the offense of handling the ball to stop a promising attack,” according to match officials.)
