Unlike, for instance, the first few days of last year’s world championships in Moscow, where Luzhniki Stadium was way too empty, here Robinson was alive and jamming. It was 79 years to the day that Jesse Owens had done his thing, tying or setting four world records in the space of 45 minutes at the Big Ten championships, and all of a sudden Sunday track and field was vital again.
They went crazy here, cheering loud and long for the consolation final in the men’s 400, won by the Belgians. The consolation final!
Daily Relay’s Jesse Squire can’t wait until next year.
The inaugural IAAF World Relays was a sellout on both of its days and the stadium was buzzing with energy. The interest among international fans was keen. Virtually every single athlete seemed to love it. The meet is coming back to Nassau next year and it might become an even bigger deal. No doubt about it, this was the best innovation by the IAAF in three decades. I am seriously considering making a trip to the Bahamas for this meet next year.
Maybe the U.S. men’s sprinters will learn to pass the baton by then.
Other than the two botched handoffs, the meet went pretty well for the Americans. The men’s distance runners were second (4×1,500) and third (4×800). The women won four of the five races and took second in the 4×1,500. And the men and women swept the marquee event — the 4×400.
BEST RETURN
Ollie Williams is back with the daily links in Olympic sports. Highlights today: A surprise loss for Indian boxing legend Mary Kom that will keep her out of the Commonwealth Games, British dominance in sprint canoe/kayak, and a wrap of gymnastics’ European Championships.
In two races in China, Gatlin ran the two fastest times of the year.
BIGGEST UPSET
Japan beat perennial champion China at the Thomas Cup (men’s badminton), then took care of Malaysia (featuring world No. 1 Lee Chong Wei) in the final.
BEST ASSIST
Columbus’ Federico Higuain sends a through ball that only has eyes for Ethan Finlay.
WORST VOID
Waking up on Saturday mornings without NBCSN’s EPL programming. Can the same crew do a cricket show or something?
Through May 23, 2014, lower-division teams have beaten MLS teams 66 times. (MLS teams have won 160.) And based on a whole lot of spreadsheets, we can declare one particular lower-division team the most accomplished team in the Open Cup.
The PDL is 38-87 against non-MLS pro leagues. But other amateur leagues are less successful against D2 and D3: 10-72.
For purposes of these upset lists, I haven’t separated D2 from D3. To my surprise, D2 (A-League/USL-1/USSF D-2/NASL) is 38-12 against D3 (D3 Pro/USL-2/USL Pro) since 1997. But the difference today is debatable. The Cup gives us scant evidence: Since 2010, when USSF D-2 split from the USL, D2 and D3 are 3-3 against each other. But against MLS teams, NASL teams (6-9, 40%) are more successful than USL Pro teams (9-21, 30%).
That’s assuming I didn’t miss anything in copying and pasting all the results from 1996 to 2014 from TheCup.us, cleaning up the data for easy sorting and searching, writing formulas to take each league name into account, etc.
Here is, to the best of my knowledge and spreadsheeting ability, a list of every U.S. Open Cup upset since MLS teams joined in 1996:
As with the FA Cup, once a top-tier team gets to the later rounds, it gets a bit more serious about the competition. That shows when we look at the quarterfinalists and semifinalists:
In typical soccer fashion, I’m going to take a whole bunch of data and then make a subjective judgment. I added up all the wins and all the runs, then ranked each team’s accomplishments based on how much they overachieved. In other words, a PDL team beating a couple of pro teams is roughly equivalent to an MLS team reaching the final.
Here goes, in reverse order:
14. Carolina RailHawks (USL-1/USSF D-2/NASL): 13 wins in seven years (through 2013). 1-time semifinalist. 4 wins over MLS teams.
2007 (USL-1): Semifinalist. Beat Chicago Fire.
2012 (NASL): Beat Los Angeles.
2013 (NASL): Quarterfinalist. Beat Los Angeles and Chivas USA.
2012: Beat Pittsburgh Riverhounds (USL Pro) 1-0 away; beat Chicago Fire (MLS) 3-2 after extra time.
8. Richmond Kickers (USL top leagues/USL-2/USL Pro): 22 wins. Champions in 1995, the first year of the pro era and the year before MLS launched. 1-time semifinalist.
2000 (A-League): Beat Colorado Rapids.
2001 (A-League): Quarterfinalist
2004 (A-League): Quarterfinalist. Beat D.C. United.
2007 (USL-2): Quarterfinalist. Beat Los Angeles.
2011 (USL-2): Semifinalist. Beat Columbus and Sporting Kansas City.
2004 (A-League): Semifinalist. Upset MetroStars (MLS) in round of 16, beat Rochester (A-League) in quarterfinals. Fell to Chicago (MLS) in extra time, just missing the final.
1996 (A-League): Runner-up. Upset Tampa Bay Mutiny in extra time (quarterfinals), upset Colorado Rapids 3-0, lost final to D.C. United.
1999 (A-League): Champion. Four straight wins over MLS teams. 1-0 over Chicago Fire, 2-1 (ET) over Dallas Burn, 3-2 over Columbus Crew and 2-0 over Colorado Rapids.
2004 (A-League): Quarterfinalist
2005 (A-League): Quarterfinalist
2009 (USL-1): Semifinalist
NOTEWORTHY RUNS/HONORABLE MENTION
1997: San Francisco Bay Seals (D3) beat two MLS teams (Kansas City Wizards, San Jose Clash) to reach semifinals.
2003: Fresno Fuego (PDL) beat Utah Blitzz (PSL) and El Paso Patriots (A-League) to reach round of 16, losing to LA Galaxy in quarterfinals. Came back in 2014 with win over Orange County Blues (USL Pro).
2005: Minnesota Thunder (A-League) beat PDL’s Chicago Fire Premier, won a wild 6-4 game in extra time over Real Salt Lake, then beat the Colorado Rapids and Kansas City Wizards (away) to reach semifinals. The year before, the Thunder beat the Los Angeles Galaxy. That’s four wins over MLS teams.
2006: Dallas Roma FC (USASA) beat PDL’s Laredo Heat on PKs, then USL-1’s Miami FC 1-0, then Chivas USA on PKs, falling in fourth round.
2006: Carolina Dynamo (PDL) beat two pro teams: Richmond Kickers (USL-2) in second round, Seattle Sounders (USL-1) in third, setting up Dynamo-Dynamo matchup vs. Houston. As a pro team, reached quarterfinals in 1996.
2007: New England Revolution (MLS) made a rare run in the Cup and won it all. Next best runs: final in 2001, semifinal in 2008.
2012: Cal FC (USASA) beat Wilmington Hammerheads (USL Pro) 4-0 away and Portland Timbers (MLS) 1-0 away.
TEAMS WITH 10 OR MORE WINS
34 Chicago Fire (2nd in the ranking above)
33 Rochester Rhinos (1st)
32 DC United (4th)
30 Seattle Sounders (3rd)
29 Charleston Battery (5th)
27 Dallas Burn / FC Dallas (7th)
23 Los Angeles Galaxy (6th)
22 Richmond Kickers (8th)
19 Columbus Crew (13th)
18 Kansas City Wizards / Sporting KC (12th)
16 MetroStars / New York Red Bulls
15 Harrisburg City Islanders (11th)
15 Wilmington Hammerheads (10th)
14 New England Revolution
13 Carolina RailHawks (14th)
12 Mid-Michigan Bucks / Michigan Bucks (9th)
12 Minnesota Thunder
12 San Jose Clash / Earthquakes
11 Carolina Dynamo
11 Des Moines Menace
10 Charlotte Eagles
10 Portland Timbers
Corrections? Comments? Commiseration for staring at spreadsheets for so long? Share below.
Writers use Game of Thrones to explain everything these days. I don’t have HBO, so maybe someone can explain Game of Thrones to me in terms of indoor soccer history. Is the Stark family the equivalent of the MISL? Is “Lord Littlefinger” Tatu?
When we last left the Indoor Soccer Wars, the MISL had a new plan for moving forward without any of the teams that played in it. The teams themselves were all going to play … somewhere.
If you’re one of the diehards who checks the BigSoccer indoor soccer forum, you’ve watched as the rumors of a new league building on the existing PASL have come true. If you’re not one of the diehards, you woke up Monday to this:
1. The PASL has won the latest Indoor Soccer War, though I’m not sure they really intended to fight. They were a low-budget alternative to the MISL, which just ended a three-year run under the auspices of the USL. Six of the seven teams from last year’s MISL departed to join this new league. The seventh, the Pennsylvania Roar, shall rest in peace.
2. It means the powers that be are trying to phase out the name “indoor” in favor of “arena.” In Mexico, it’s actually “futbol rapido,” because it often takes place outside, neither in a stadium nor an arena.
It’s more scenic than the place I play, but half my clearances would end up in the trees. (Photo from Mario Ortegon via Wikimedia Commons; click image for original)
3. It means the Baltimore Blast, Dallas Sidekicks, Milwaukee Wave, San Diego Sockers and the Not-Tacoma Stars (more explanation on Facebook) will be in the same league, just like the old days. In several cases, they’ll have more ties to their glory days than the current Seattle Sounders, New York Cosmos, Tampa Bay Rowdies, Portland Timbers, etc.
4. With 24 teams, this will be the largest top-level indoor (er, arena) league since … ever. The NASL had 24 outdoor teams in the 70s, and it had an indoor league, but not all the teams participated. Spoilsports.
(I’m not going to sum up indoor soccer history because I already did it. And that includes the infamous San Diego Sockers rap video.)
The PASL’s pro league (they also have amateur competitions) contributes 14 teams. Their average attendance early last season ranged from 6,144 to 242. The lack of parity showed in the standings, as the San Diego Sockers claimed a record win streak that the Washington Kastles (World Team Tennis) also claimed. (Sadly, the new league is not taking Dan Steinberg’s suggestion – United Alliance of Super Awesome Amazing Indoor Soccer Playing Awesome People.)
Beyond that, a lot of things are up in the air. They still haven’t settled the argument over Multiple Point Scoring (2 points for most goals, 3 points for a goal shot from beyond an arc), which is to arena soccer fans what promotion/relegation is to outdoor soccer fans.
The Baltimore Blast, by most measures the most stable NPSL/NISL/MISL team, is one of the big movers and shakers behind the new league along with the San Diego Sockers and Missouri Comets. Next step: Re-signing all the players.
(Yes, those are the same Missouri Comets whose sibling team is FC Kansas City of the NWSL. In Vlatko we trust.)
There is still a World Cup scheduled for March, pushed back from February. The organizing body used to be FIFRA — futbol rapido accounts for the “FR” of the name — but it’s now the Confederation Panamericana de Minifutbol (warning — my SiteAdvisor rated that site “yellow), an affiliate of the World Minifootball Federation, which is an umbrella of various 5-, 6- and 7-a-side games. Except futsal and beach soccer, which are under the control of FIFA. Got it?
But back to this continent: The indoor game has a consistent, coherent direction now. There’s a pro/amateur organization. All the indoor teams in the USA are on the same page.
And that really can’t be a bad thing.
If you don’t like indoor soccer, ignore it — which you already are. If you do like it, a lot of the clutter of the past 15 years is gone, and that has to be encouraging.
Remember: Cross the finish line before you celebrate.
Two people forgot that lesson this week. The first one, Spanish cyclist Eloy Teruel, had an excuse. The finish for this particular stage of the Tour of California had multiple laps, and he didn’t realize he had one more.
And he maintained a sense of humor.
Me pudieron las ganas de victoria ,menos mal que nadie lo ha visto jajajajajaja
Also in track and field this week: Most of the Diamond League women’s steeplechase field decided not to go with the pacemaker. Too fast. American Emma Coburn took off with her. Everyone else waited for Coburn to crack and come back. She didn’t.
Daily Relay sums up what we learned from the Diamond League stop in Shanghai. The main takeaway: Blessing Okagbare is a legitimate triple threat.
Back to cycling: The overall winner of the Tour of California already has quite a few honors, even in his name.
Best triathlete in Yokohama: Gwen Jorgensen won in the Japanese city for the second straight year.
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Best catch: No, not baseball. Cricket. Your typical “catch, fling it in the air because you’re going over the boundary, jump back in and catch it again” play.
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Best shooting mom: Olympic multimedalist Kim Rhode, who had a baby in the time between London 2012 and now, won her second straight skeet shooting World Cup.
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Longest squash rally: As squash points go, this was the jam band/prog rock version.
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Best equestrian 1-2:
So McLain Ward wins the Empire State Grand Prix with HH Cannavaro and finishes 2nd with HH Carlos Z! #OSFSpring
The IOC is bringing all its top people to Norway, and Alan Abrahamson quite rightly sees it as a sales pitch in a desperate bid to avoid hosting the 2022 Olympics in Almaty or Beijing.
The imperative – at least for now – is that the IOC would seem to need Oslo for the 2022 race more than Oslo needs the Winter Games. That is the box. And everyone in Olympic circles knows it.
Soccer karma does not exist, most of us have agreed. But can a team make its own luck?
Saturday at the SoccerPlex looked like a typical Washington Spirit game against the Western New York Flash for 45 minutes. The Spirit had a few promising moments — one difference from previous engagements would be the world-class goal from Jodie Taylor that gave the Spirit the lead. But the Flash led 2-1, and it could’ve been more.
In the second half, the Flash either forgot or declined to play soccer. They looked less like the Flash playing the Spirit and more like the Virginia Beach Piranhas bringing their “physical” presence against D.C. United Women.
Stating for the record: The Flash are not a dirty team. But it’s still stunning to watch a team riddled with world-class players and a history of accomplishment come in against the Washington Spirit and foul out of frustration and retaliation. Their petulance — and what coach Aaran Lines described as an inability to string three passes together — was costly.
And the Spirit made their own luck as well. A couple of tactical adjustments gave the home team quite a bit more of the ball, and they dominated the second half to a greater degree than the Flash dominated the first. Final score: 3-2 Spirit.
That’s a confidence-booster for the hosts. Jodie Taylor finally got her goals — two, nearly four. Yael Averbuch played her best game for the Spirit. Lori Lindsey got an extended run and fared well. Robyn Gayle defended well and was close to a goal and an assist. Ali Krieger did just fine at center back.
Referee Katja Koroleva had a puzzler, often allowing outright muggings while punishing the odd single-handed shove. Lines wasn’t happy: “The referee was inconsistent, regardless of the result. But that seems to be a tendency within the NWSL.”
But the Flash simply forced Koroleva to blow her whistle. She went nearly 45 minutes without calling anything on the Flash, but some fouls were just too obvious.
Here’s the video, and here’s how it unfolded:
FIRST HALF
6:15 – Big flurry for the Flash as Ashlyn Harris can’t hold a hard shot.
7:15 – Hard sliding foul from Spirit defender Bianca Sierra on Sonia Bermudez. Sierra started at right back, with Ali Krieger going to the center to replace the injured Toni Pressley.
8:15 – Spirit midfielder Veronica Perez goes hard for a 50-50 ball, banging into the midsection of a Flash player.
8:20 – To paraphrase The Untouchables, she sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of hers to the morgue. The Flash’s Carli Lloyd clobbers Christine Nairn, who gets up and looks back as if to say “What the …?” Danielle Malagari, the Spirit’s color commentator, goes out on a limb and predicts a physical game.
But that’s the last foul called on the Flash in the first half.
10:35 – Lori Lindsey sends a well-weighted ball ahead to Jodie Taylor, who finishes with a world-class chip. 1-0 Spirit.
12:55 – Adriana hits the crossbar for the Flash.
16:35 – The camera doesn’t quite catch the dubious decision involving Tori Huster, a required part of every Spirit game. Abby Wambach flings the Spirit defender to the grass like a Nickelodeon game show contestant ridding herself of slime.
16:55 – The unlucky Huster finds herself isolated against Wambach in acres of space, and Wambach simply heads exactly where she wanted it to go. 1-1.
19:00 – The crowd doesn’t like an offside call that nullified yet another Taylor goal. Replay is inconclusive.
29:25 – Lloyd wins a duel with Huster, then beats Krieger and Harris while avoiding Gayle. 2-1 Flash.
34:20 – Lloyd takes a knock to the eye or nose when she tangles with Averbuch. Hard to see what happened, but no one complains.
HALFTIME
Flash coach Aaran Lines was pleased with how the first half proceeded. But oddly enough, so were the Spirit players and coaches.
“We were really happy at halftime,” Spirit coach Mark Parsons said. “Really positive at halftime despite being 2-1 down.”
Parsons made a couple of changes. Krieger was already at center back, replacing the injured Toni Pressley. At right back, Sierra started but gave way at halftime to the small Swiss Army knife that is Crystal Dunn, who shifted back from midfield with the intent of containing Bermudez, a Flash’s Spanish international.
And the Spirit merely brought on one of the best players in the sport, Diana Matheson, who sat out the first half and spent halftime jogging and smiling at the parade of ODSL youth players being honored for sportsmanship. You have to hope they didn’t get any ideas from what they saw in the second half.
“We came out the second half and we were really flat,” Wambach said. “Credit to the Spirit for making changes and making life difficult for us on the other side of the ball. To be honest, the second half, we were defending the whole game.”
So the Flash tried to make life as difficult for the Spirit as the officials would allow. Matheson stepped into a hornet’s nest, credited with two fouls suffered but roughed up much more often than that.
SECOND HALF
55:25 – Save, Abby Wambach
56:05 – Lloyd clatters into Matheson from behind, drawing a whistle and some words from the ref.
64:30 – Lloyd gives a little “Who, me?” look after getting a little bit (not much) of Dunn’s foot along with the ball.
68:15 – Kristen Edmonds drapes an arm over Matheson and brings her down. Foul and a lecture.
69:15 – Gayle nutmegs a defender. Cross is partially cleared to Yael Averbuch, who beats Lloyd and shoots. Deflected, then Taylor fires up off the crossbar. Bounces off Kat Williamson’s back and in. 2-2.
72:45 – It’s nothing, really, but it’s funny to see Wambach reaching out to grab Matheson like she’s swatting at a fly. Just a slight size difference there.
73:05 – Harris comes out for the second time in a minute to deny an onrushing Flash attacker — Salem this time, Spencer earlier.
73:30 – Nairn shoots high while Lloyd slides through her legs. No whistle.
74:10 – Salem gets the yellow, again for a foul on the unfortunate Nairn.
77:05 – Nairn suffers another foul. And that eventually leads to …
77:30 – Averbuch flicks a header, Taylor finishes. 3-2
85:05 – Gayle seems to be attempting to jump OVER former teammate Jasmyne Spencer. Not quite. Ref starts to play advantage but then calls it back.
85:35 – The Wambach-Huster incident (replay at 87:15). We’ll come back to this.
89:05 – Ref doesn’t think Angeli fouled Lloyd
90:15 – Spirit commentator Michael Minnich isn’t imagining things. The sign on the fourth official’s table says “3.” But by the time he actually raises it, it says “5.” (No, there wasn’t a sub wearing No. 3.)
91:55 – Maybe this is karma. The call for a corner kick is clearly wrong. Harris sets up for a goal kick. What you don’t see is a very confused ballgirl. Then Harris makes a save off the corner kick. The rebound … goes wide.
93:45 – Hey, Spirit? Need help killing those five minutes? Sure — I’ll just slide through the back of Renae Cuellar here, drawing my second yellow, and I’ll be slow to get up while the ref holds my red card.
Lines faulted his player, Angela Salem, not the ref. “At that point in the game, to see Ang go in was unfortunate.”
But that was the story of the second half for the Flash. They played nothing that really resembled soccer.
Malagari, sometime in the second half: “I think the Flash have kind of dug themselves a hole here. They’re kind of playing, I personally think, for blood a little bit. The fouls have been pretty dangerous in and around their own 18.”
We can’t let the game go without mentioning the Wambach-Huster incident at the end. While Harris calmly collected the ball, Wambach raced past Huster. From the replay, it appears Huster was actually turning her body out of Wambach’s way. And still, they bumped into each other — in the same way that my car recently bumped into a concrete wall in a parking garage.
Did Huster embellish her fall? Hard to say. But from one reliable reporter on the sideline, Wambach didn’t exactly deny making contact:
I thought at first Cynthia was kidding, like I was kidding last summer when I suggested what Alex Morgan could be saying and unleashed the wrath of Morgan’s Twitter followers on myself. Cynthia says no.
Tori, care to comment?
“Not really,” she said. “Just gotta leave that kind of stuff on the field. It gets heated. There’s not really not much to say.”
Rough game, though, right?
“They are definitely intense,” Huster said. “They can move the ball around, but they have that grit to them. So we were definitely trying to prepare for that in the week leading up. We knew we had to get stuck in the first five minutes and impose our rhythm.”
As she left, I reminded her to tend to the blood on her left wrist. Not sure how she got that.
Matheson was diplomatic. “They’re definitely a physical team. Lloyd and Wambach always come to battle. But in this league, every team is a physical team, so I don’t think it’s too different.”
But that physicality can be self-defeating. Look at the second half, and it seems the Flash literally took their eyes off the ball.
The Diamond League is the lead story this week, with a few athletes already in midseason form.
– The men’s high jump was insane, with Russia’s Ivan Ukhov just 0.04 meters off the world record and just 0.04 meters ahead of the next three jumpers.
– Kenya’s Asbel Kiprop set a meet record and nearly reached the top 10 of all time in the men’s 1,500 meters, finishing in 3:29.18. The top six were all under 3:31.
– Hellen Obiri, also of Kenya, ran the fastest 3,000 meters of all time aside from four people in a sketchy meet in China in 1993. She finished in 8:20.68.
– The USA’s LaShawn Merritt tied his own 2014 world lead (44.44 seconds) in the 400 meters.
Today is the opener of track and field’s Diamond League, which will be the best competition we have in this non-Olympic, non-World Championship year. (Watch on Universal Sports at noon ET.)
I’m excited, and I know most of you aren’t.
I think part of the problem is that we don’t really know what qualifies as a “good” performance. We see that someone ran the 100-meter hurdles in 12.62 seconds. That doesn’t capture the imagination.
So I’m experimenting with a chart that will help you figure out what’s what. You’ll see the world records (some of them set in an era of sketchy or nonexistent drug testing), the best performance of the 10th-best performer of all time, the U.S. record, the best performance of 2013, the best performance of the 5th-best performer of 2013, and the best performance of 2014 (through May 7).
Then you’ll see what the complex IAAF scoring tables, set by statistical analysis way above my mathematical abilities, tell you are elite-level performances — the 1,300- and 1,200-point levels. In several disciplines, no one has ever reached the 1,300-point level. But in most disciplines, a 1,200-point performance is needed to win.
Then I tossed in the worst time (or distance or height) of the winning Diamond League performances from 2013. Take those with a grain of salt. Every now and then, you get a sprint into a headwind, a field event in driving rain, or a “tactical” distance race in which everyone goes slowly (by their standards) and figures they’ll win with a big kick at the end.
But those Diamond League marks can sometimes tell you we’re about to see things rev up in a big way. See those events in which the best performance of 2014 (so far) is worse than the worst winning performance of last year’s Diamond League? Yeah. Time to go faster, higher, farther.
Best roundup of a neglected competition format: The year in college track and field dual meets, from DailyRelay.com.
Best roundup of the rest of the track and field world: Again, DailyRelay.com, which has a few words to explain why Meb Keflegizhi’s Boston win wasn’t a shock, an upset that could shake up the LaShawn Merritt-Kirani James rivalry in the men’s 400, a stunning U.S. performance in the men’s 5,000, the bewildering application of justice in the Tyson Gay doping case, Christian Cantwell’s rebound from 2013 in the shot put … just read the whole thing. We’ll wait.
Most accessible track circuit debut: Fans are close to the action in the new American Track League. Music by Velveteen Playboys — that’s Friend of SportsMyriad Paul Souza in the awesome suit.
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Boldest women’s sports projection:
Pro hockey league flourishing/Olympic gold 4 non-North American team: "Where do you c ur sport in next 10 years? 20 years? #WSFCELEBRATES40”
The women’s team took silver, beating Ukraine in the semis and losing to Russia in the final.
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Biggest U.S. beach volleyball event: July’s ASICS World Series of Beach Volleyball combines the competitive heft of an FIVB event with some uniquely American trappings.
Worst spelling of “unforced”:
We just got our butts kicked by Brazil. It hurts. Too many enforced errors. Lots of learning to do!… http://t.co/0XzsTCBnro
— Kerri Walsh Jennings (@kerrileewalsh) May 3, 2014
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Cutest dog: Lindsey Jacobellis already had a dog before she left for the 2014 Olympics. That’s the one on the right. The one on the left is named Sochi, for obvious reasons. (HT: For The Win)
Worst undying controversy: So it wasn’t the suits that caused the US Speedskating flop in Sochi! It was altitude training, skate polishing, and the fact that the skaters weren’t used to … well, the suits.
Least impressed person in wake of US Speedskating report: Unless something is seriously lost in translation, Shani Davis has had it with the federation. (HT: @nzaccardi)
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Least surprising world champion:
China sweeps World Team Table Tennis Championships: TOKYO, May 5 — China overcame the shock upse… http://t.co/dHJrHDfMgj <–Full Story
Over the winter, Seattle coach/GM Laura Harvey was elevated to mystical status. Soft-spoken and youthful, the veteran of England’s top-level game somehow pulled off deal after deal.
If you see this woman approaching, be careful to avoid trading away your house for the rights to a player still in Sweden.
Women’s soccer fans joked that Harvey was making another deal at every waking moment. On a panel with Spirit coach Mark Parsons? Surely offering her backup right back for Diana Matheson. Reading the paper? Surely perusing more trade options. Ordering at Panera? Maybe they would take a fourth-round draft pick for Erika Tymrak and some soup in a bread bowl.
Those were the jokes when we didn’t see how all these deals would pay off. What can we say now that the Reign have won their first five games?
The fifth was in many respects the most fortunate of those wins. After all, this was the first game Seattle has won by less than two goals. The Washington Spirit had Seattle on its heels for portions of the game, causing some confusion in central defense. One defender nearly kicked Hope Solo in the head on a muddled clearance. And for the first time this season, the Reign — please sit down and brace yourself — surrendered a goal in the run of play. (Washington has scored both goals Seattle has given up this year — the first was a penalty kick in their prior meeting in Seattle.)
But Seattle never backed away from its simple strategy.
“The old adage of ‘attack’s the best form of defense’ is something we definitely employ,” Harvey said.
And the lineup was attack-minded in every sense. Maybe you could call it a 4-2-3-1, with Jess Fishlock and Keelin Winters at holding mid and Beverly Goebel, Nahoma Kawasumi and Kim Little buzzing around behind target forward Sydney Leroux. But it really looked a bit more like a 4-1-2-3. And if that wasn’t enough for the attack, right back Elli Reed constantly streaked up the flank and put in dangerous crosses while defenders were occupied with everyone else.
“As an outside back, it’s pretty much expected of you today to get forward and get crosses off,” Reed said. “This is a nice big field, so it allowed me to get forward a bit more.”
Five, six, maybe seven attackers at once. Could Harvey explain that concept to Chelsea’s Jose Mourinho, Europe’s best-paid bus-parking attendant? The former Arsenal women’s coach laughed. “You can’t knock him — he still might win the Premier League!”
It’s fun to watch, especially against a team like the Spirit that’s willing to go toe-to-toe with the Reign. And that style attracts players.
NWSL Player of the Month Kim Little: “I know Laura very well. I worked with her for three years at Arsenal. I love the way that she wants to play football.”
Spirit coach Mark Parsons countered with a novel move, playing the irrepressible Crystal Dunn at attacking midfield to tie up Fishlock and Winters. Sounds crazy, but he was right. Fishlock was involved in some chippiness in midfield but wasn’t much of a factor, nor was Winters.
That just left room for Seattle to press on the wings.
“Yes, Seattle were tired on a long trip, but they’ve got sheer quality everywhere,” Parsons said. “They’re a Dream Team. They’re an absolute Dream Team all over the pitch.”
And apparently quite fit. Seattle has played four games in 11 days — two at home, one in atrocious conditions in New Jersey, then last night’s game. (At least the threatened rain never materialized — the evening was pleasant.) A lot of coaches would rotate players in those circumstances.
Not Harvey. Six Reign players have played all 450 minutes this season. Three more have played at least 440. Take away the one change Harvey has made in her starting lineup (Megan Rapinoe went 90 in the one game for which she has been healthy and available), and non-starters on the team have played a total of 79 minutes.
Harvey: “The reason why I haven’t rotated the side yet is that when you’re winning games, it’s hard to.”
Like Yoda, this coach is.
Leroux scored her first goal of the season last night, pouncing on a Spirit giveaway and getting just enough space past Tori Huster to fire far post past Ashlyn Harris. She doesn’t mind seeing seven teammates open their scoring tally before she did.
“It felt, in Boston, a little bit like me and Heather (O’Reilly) and a few others had to really be on point. With this team, I feel like we have so much depth. Every single player on the field is unbelievable. That’s no discredit to Boston at all, but I do feel Seattle is the team to beat right now, for sure.”
Harvey, looking ahead to the next game in a tough schedule in May, disagrees.
“Portland-Seattle is a great rivalry. Portland are champions. They are who they are for a reason. They were the best team in the league last season, and for me, they’re the favorites for the league this season no matter what results have been so far.”
Yes, that next game is in Portland. The Northwest rivalry. Defending champ vs. unbeaten team. No. 1 vs. No. 2.
(Opens Google Calendar — makes appointment for 10 p.m. ET Saturday.)
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