Thorns 2, Louisville 0: Takeaways: Stream of Consciousness Edition

The Thorns earned a comfortable if unspectacular three points on the road today against Racing Louisville FC. With much of the starting lineup away with the US and Canadian national teams to prepare for the Olympics, we saw a return to a B-side Thorns lineup that we’ve gotten pretty familiar with by now.

So far we’ve always done these recaps in a list format, but I don’t feel like doing that tonight, so I’m just going to let this one ~flow~.

Something I find interesting about this iteration of the Thorns is the consistency of tactics from game to game, regardless of lineup or opponent. It’s not like they don’t adjust at all, but they’ve played the same formation since the 2020 Challenge Cup, and their defensive strategy, especially, is very consistent regardless of who’s on the field. This hasn’t always been Mark Parsons’s approach; the first few years I covered the team saw them deploy multiple shapes in each season and use pressing systems that changed depending on player availability.

What’s remarkable about this on the defensive side is that in the past, when the back line wasn’t consistent—often the case when Emily Sonnett and Ellie Carpenter were in and out of national team camps and players like Emily Menges and Meghan Klingenberg dealt with injuries—its performance suffered. But this season has already seen at least as much defensive turnover as any past Parsons season (I think it’s more, but I’m not going to dig up my 2017–2018 notebook to check, sorry), and the team has the third fewest goals allowed in the league, behind North Carolina and the ungodly lucky Gotham FC.

I’m… not sure why that is. It might be as simple as “the team has a lot of depth,” which they do. But it feels like there’s more than that—the press is so organized and effective, and the team’s quality in that area changes basically not at all, regardless of lineup.

Anyway, back to today: we did see some changes, importantly with Celeste Boureille and Marissa Everett slotting in for Lindsey Horan and Christine Sinclair. With Crystal Dunn also out, Rocky Rodríguez and Angela Salem both started, where they’ve been tagging in for each other. Those changes did make a difference offensively; there’s simply no replacing the creative genius those players provide, and the Thorns spent most of their attacking energy moving up the wings, and quite a bit of it sending in aimless crosses. On that point, though, it also has to be said that Louisville did well to stay compact centrally and force the Thorns wide. They didn’t press high, and once they dropped into their defensive block, Portland wasn’t able to break them down.

On the other hand—and this brings me back to my earlier point about the defense—Boureille did a bang-up job defensively, notching three tackles and running the length of the field, Horan-like, throughout the 90 minutes. Angela Salem, as always, was a bulldog, shutting down the handful of Louisville attacks that made their way into Portland’s defensive third, and ending the game with four chances created.

The Everett-Sinc difference is even bigger, and probably represents the biggest change in what the team is capable of going forward. Everett does the hard defensive work well, and she managed to get into the box at the right moment a number of times, but she is simply not Christine Sinclair, OC, and she’s not the same kind of link between the midfield and the forwards as the captain is.

So in short, where the full Thorns team can score any number of ways, this lineup was more or less limited to a subset of that toolbox: set pieces, balls over the top, and quick transition plays. They had a few decent looks on transition in the first half, but ultimately either lacked precision in finishing or hesitated too long and couldn’t move the ball fast enough through the final third.

But the goals came anyway, the first from a confidently shot Rocky Rodríguez penalty (after she was fouled off a corner kick), and the second when Simone Charley found the end of a sweet lofted pass by Menges (after a corner kick Kling took short), marking the defender’s first-ever Thorns assist.

The game had been all but over for a while by the time the thing this game will be remembered for happened. Fifteen-year-old Olivia Moultrie usurped Ellie Carpenter as the youngest-ever player to get minutes in an NWSL game when she subbed in for Salem after 83 minutes. And after all the noise around whether she should be allowed to sign a professional contract, the lawsuit, the media blitz, the numberless tweets—perhaps unsurprisingly, she was fine. She didn’t stand out as great, but she didn’t get bodied, either. She won the ball a couple times, lost it a couple, made some passes. Pretty standard stuff for a late-game sub, which is very impressive given her age.