Tag: seattle reign

women's soccer

Spirit, Reign play a legitimately entertaining soccer game

Posted on by Beau Dure

Things didn’t bode well Saturday. Traffic heading up the Beltway to Maryland was worse than usual. The SoccerPlex didn’t have its usual Ben & Jerry’s cart — Yom Kippur apparently kept the proprietor away.

And Seattle’s Jess Fishlock, simultaneously one of the most inspirational and infuriating players in women’s soccer, started the game by clattering into Washington’s Mallory Pugh, the type of foul that does nothing other than send an early message.

Then a funny thing happened. An actual soccer game broke out. Free-flowing. Long strings of passes. Good runs.

For Spirit fans, it looked a bit like 2016 all of a sudden, with Pugh replacing Crystal Dunn and Meggie Dougherty Howard replacing everyone else. The two rookies carved up the Seattle defense with incisive passes en route to a 2-0 lead.

But the defense certainly isn’t last year’s defense. The Reign got back into the game as Spirit defenders kept whiffing on clearances. It’s the SoccerPlex — a terrific playing surface on which the Spirit play every home game. They should be used to it.

And credit to the Reign. They were pressing. They didn’t want their season to end on a loss. And coach Laura Harvey told us after the game, incongruously given her giddiness after Seattle’s 3-2 win, that she had reminded players at halftime they were playing for their jobs.

So were the Spirit players. Looking ahead to next season, they’ll build around their two sensational rookies from opposite ends of the hype meter — national teamer Pugh, who skipped out on UCLA to go pro early, and third-round pick Dougherty Howard. Of the other 11 Spirit players to appear in the game, who’s guaranteed to return next year? Probably captain Shelina Zadorsky and original Spirit player Tori Huster, who can surely play for the Spirit as long as she wants. Anyone else?

It’s not that the players are particularly bad. As a whole, even with a viable starting XI on the injury report, Washington had a competitive team this season. It’s strange to say for a last-place team, but they overachieved. If you’d told me before the season they’d have this many injuries but would still win five games (two more than the disastrous 2013 season) and score 30 goals (more than Kansas City, Boston and Houston, and only three less than playoff-bound Chicago), I’d have said that’s impossible.

The defense, though, needs to be addressed. I don’t want to speculate on whether Stephanie Labbe will be back in goal for the Spirit — I simply hope she’s happy and healthy. Zadorsky is generally solid, and Estelle Johnson was having a career year until her injury. Other than that, it’s simply not a reliable group of players for this level.

They’ll surely draft Andi Sullivan, who could slot in at center back alongside Zadorsky. But she can have a bigger impact in midfield.

They can’t just draft a bunch of defenders with their surplus of picks and see who emerges. The Spirit have enough youth. If they want their rebuilding project to be 1-2 years instead of 3-4, they need to make a trade or a sign a big-time free agent.

But there’s time enough to deal with that. Tonight, it seems most NWSL fans got an entertaining sendoff to the regular season, a nice change of pace from what’s been a lackluster season marked by cynical play that the referees refuse to stop.

Whatever you think of the Spirit, let’s hope tonight’s slate of games was a nice harbinger of things to come next year.

 

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soccer

Ali Krieger and the case of the missing midfielder

Posted on by Beau Dure

Ali Krieger won’t be with the Washington Spirit for the NWSL semifinal at Seattle. Does it matter?

Her absence, to attend her father’s wedding, is certainly a surprise. Her father, Ken, is a Virginia Youth Soccer Hall of Famer and the type of person you’d think would cut off his arm to be at an important soccer game. And he’s lucky that the D.C. United Academy team he coaches has the week off.

Women’s soccer fans love a good debate. Sometimes. Other times, they’re furious that anyone would even dare to question the noble intent of their favorite players. Or any players. So we can imagine the screaming in the wake of this news. The rough consensus on my Twitter timeline: “Leave Krieger alone! Blame the NWSL for not scheduling things farther in advance!” (I’m not sure what to make of the latter point — if they set the date a year ago, not realizing the NWSL would run into September, then it makes sense. But if they were scheduling it — or hadn’t even made a lot of nonrefundable deposits — over the winter, you’d think they might have figured a playoff game was a possibility.)

The rough consensus at The Equalizer is a little harsher.

(I have to give credit here to Jeff Kassouf for this marvelous and completely apt turn of phrase: “The deja vu seemed so ludicrous that Dure asked Parsons if he was joking.”)

So that’s the off-field debate. What about on the field? Perhaps this is an even more controversial point, which may explain why I’m phrasing it with so many qualifiers that a good editor would lop out of the story: The Spirit might not really miss Ali Krieger this weekend.

Make no mistake — you can’t talk about the best right backs in the world without talking about Krieger. She might be No. 1. She didn’t make FIFA’s Who-Voted-On-This-Stuff Team from the World Cup, but neither did Becky Sauerbrunn, which should be enough to send all of those voters to a therapist or an optometrist. Krieger was surely squeezed out because voters didn’t feel comfortable naming all four defenders from one team, no matter how well deserved. So forget the voting and look at the results — Krieger got into the attack on occasion (more effectively when Jill Ellis suddenly ditched the “whack it to Wambach” tactics), and every player on that line had to be in world-class form to stifle Germany as effectively as they did.

But Krieger hasn’t been playing right back for the Spirit. She has been playing defensive midfielder. And she might not be the best defensive midfielder on her own team.

It’s not quite the typical 4-5-1 or 4-1-2-3 or whatever you call it on Mark Parsons’ team. He has Crystal Dunn, Francisca Ordega and Diana Matheson at forward and on the wings, somewhat interchangeably. The three midfielders behind them also have overlapping roles.

Krieger has been in that mix. And though the view from the pressbox doesn’t always tell you everything, she hasn’t seemed as comfortable going forward as Christine “I WILL SHOOT FROM 30 YARDS AND TERRIFY THE KEEPER” Nairn or whichever midfielder Parsons selects from Joanna Lohman and Angela Salem.

Parsons has patiently told the assembled Washington-area media that Krieger has contributed in ways we really haven’t noticed — specifically, marking another player out of the game. Maybe Carli Lloyd. Maybe Kim Little. (Repetition alert: This point was also in my SoccerWire preview, which was obviously written before the Krieger news broke in the conference call. That’ll teach me to wait until the conference call.)

She’s not even playing a traditional No. 6. It’s as if Parsons is channeling Jim Valvano and turned Krieger into the “one” in a box-and-one.

That’s an important role, of course. But can the Spirit get some of that defensive tenacity, maybe by committee?

We the media botched the conference call yesterday in one important sense — we forgot to inquire into the health and form of one Tori Huster. The versatile player was a cornerstone in whatever the Spirit did right in its first two seasons. But she hasn’t been at full health or full form this year, perhaps feeling the effects of spending her offseasons playing in Australia or just dealing with nagging injuries here and there.

Maybe Parsons, who joked that he wished I hadn’t asked the “surprise news” question and forced him (not really) to reveal the Krieger news, is holding Huster in reserve and is sitting somewhere with a relieved smile that none of us thought to ask?

Or maybe Huster isn’t ready to go, and he’ll just put Lohman and Salem on the field together. Less surprising, but possibly effective as well.

If you’ve watched Krieger off the ball at Spirit games recently, you’ve noticed that she often seems a little less than fully engaged. WoSo fans might debate whether that’s a lack of motivation or just a sign that she’s worn down from the World Cup summer. That only matters if you’re dead set on putting Krieger on trial, and really, what’s the point of that?

The only practical concern here is that Krieger’s absence shouldn’t be a crushing blow for the Spirit. They have other defensive midfielders, maybe not as capable at 1v1 defense as Krieger but perhaps more comfortable giving some depth to the Spirit attack. They have other leaders — the quiet but inspirational Diana Matheson, the much louder and also inspirational Ashlyn Harris.

And if Seattle mastermind Laura Harvey thought she had the Spirit figured out last week, now she has to wonder what her good friend has in store now.

Said it last week — I’d pay to watch Harvey and Parsons play chess. This semifinal ought to be interesting.

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National Weird Soccer League: The Spirit-Reign regular season finale/Part 1

Posted on by Beau Dure

I would probably pay good money to watch Laura Harvey and Mark Parsons play chess.

It’s not just that they are, as their fellow Englishpeople would say, bloody brilliant. It’s the fact that entertaining eccentricities and stunning plays just seem to follow them around.

Consider tonight’s game, where the turning point apparently came during the pregame introductions, when the Spirit’s PA announcer gave Hope Solo’s number the wrong number: No. 2 rather than No. 1. A quick correction, drawing a thumbs-up and a smile from Solo, apparently didn’t appease fiery Reign player Jess Fishlock.

“I think it got chippy because — I have so much respect for Washington Spirit as an organization, and I have so much respect for Ashlyn, but what they did at the beginning of the game to disrespect Hope Solo, a goalkeeper that’s won the Golden Glove in the World Cup, is actually a little bit disgusting. So that’s why we had a bit of a chip on our shoulder, because we protect our teammates, and it’s just unnecessary to do that.”

Wait a minute — what? Was it something the Spirit Squadron said? Was it the incident late in the game in which Solo was banged up in a multiplayer collision, though it didn’t seem upon live viewing that any one person was to blame. (The ref had a different opinion, but based on the absurd calls and non-calls throughout the game, I refuse to take that opinion seriously. Some serious conversations need to take place between the NWSL and PRO. This is ridiculous. Are we going to wait until a game gets totally out of control and a national team player breaks a leg?)

No.

“They announced Hope Solo as No. 2, and I think that’s a little bit disgusting.”

A couple of us who have been to a lot of Spirit games were compelled to tell her it absolutely could not have been intentional. That’s not the first idiosyncrasy we’ve heard over the PA at a Spirit game.

Here’s the deal: The announcer writes a few numerical cues on the margin of the paper to get the order correct. The captain is the first person announced — so, No. 1. Goalkeeper is second, No. 2. Easy to transpose the two columns — the order in which players are announced, and the jersey number.

And that’s easier to believe than “Hmmm, maybe I can make a subtle jab suggesting Solo should be Ashlyn Harris’ backup on the national team. I’ll say she’s No. 2.”

The other curious thing about it, as Spirit broadcast commentator Danielle Malagari points out:

But as puzzling as Fishlock’s comments were, Harvey pointed to some weird, wild stuff on the Reign’s trip to the nation’s … distant suburb of the capital.

“If you’d looked at our Washington trip, you would’ve thought everything went against us. We couldn’t train yesterday because of lightning, we had wake-up calls at 8 a.m. from the hotel … I joke with Mark, I know that’s not him. But maybe the announcer thing is the icing on the cake.”

If you really want to draw out the conspiracy theory, you’d note that all of the league’s hotel information was recently posted by a reporter … in Portland! Seattle’s big rival!

But who would call and leave a prank wake-up call for 8 a.m.? Is that considered early by some people? I have kids and dogs. By 8 a.m., I’m sometimes considering a nap.

Harvey, though, clearly wasn’t taking such talk seriously. The game, on the other hand, was something she took quite seriously despite having nothing at stake, while the Spirit needed a win to have a chance to host a playoff game.

“I actually spoke to Mark in the week. We speak daily. And we joke around. But I said to him I’m going to come and try to win the game in the sense that I think that’s the right thing to do. I could’ve come here and not played Hope, not played Pinoe (who was subbed out early in the second half, perhaps as much because her tackles seemed hell-bent on getting a nice suspension for the playoffs as any need to rest), not played Jess and not played Kim. The reality is people have paid good money to watch a good game. I’m sure they want to see the Spirit again at home (in the playoffs), but it wouldn’t have been right or fair on my team or the league if I hadn’t have come to win.”

And early on, Harvey’s game plan worked beautifully. Defenders were in place to stop the Crystal Dunn counterattacking menace. The Reign swung the ball around, playing a semi-direct style to put attackers in against Spirit defenders, who struggled to contain them. They were running the Reign attack toward defenders other than Megan Oyster, whom Laura Harvey touted for league Rookie of the Year honors.

Fishlock thought the tired Reign players didn’t execute quite as well as fatigue set in. And the Spirit indeed had some good moments late in the first half and early in the second.

Every other aspect of the game seems debatable. Parsons and Diana Matheson were pretty positive when talking about the Spirit’s performance. Ashlyn Harris was not. Parsons is still bullish on playing Ali Krieger in midfield, saying she contained Kim Little. I still don’t think Krieger looks comfortable there, and I know others agree. (That said — Little didn’t have quite as much impact on the game today as she has in the past.)

A few stray notes:

Predmore vs. the fourth official and others: Reign owner Bill Predmore was behind the Seattle bench tonight. Some Spirit staffers objected. The fourth official had a prolonged conversation with him right around the time the Reign scored their second goal.

I don’t know NWSL protocol for that situation. I just hope the Spirit volunteer got her phone back.

Seen in the stands: Former Philadelphia Independence owner David Halstead.

Plex problems: We’re now keeping our food out of the pressbox because food might attract critters who might chew through the cables that keep the Spirit’s fine broadcast connected to YouTube. That speaks volumes about the state of the Soccerplex right now.

It’s a beautiful field. It’s a beautiful venue. It’s fun to have fans so close to the action. The air always feels fresh.

But the facilities are in dire need of upgrades.

Also, new this season, traffic! I left the parking lot at 9:45 p.m., about 45 minutes after the game ended. Took me 15 minutes to get out of the Plex.

Behind me — the Reign’s bus.

Yeah, their strange trip continues.

See you again in eight days — this time in Seattle, this time with a trip to the final at stake.

 

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soccer

NWSL: Who’ll stop the Reign?

Posted on by Beau Dure

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.
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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Washington Spirit vs. Seattle: The final whistle

Posted on by Beau Dure

Wednesday’s game against Chicago was, by all practical measures, the Spirit’s first win since May 16. The league rules are clear. Washington was the better side in the 77 minutes played before the first lightning delay. As cruel as it was for the Red Stars to have their playoff hopes officially extinguished without even being on the field, the Spirit won fair and square.

But it was incomplete. Wednesday night/Thursday morning, Mark Parsons talked about not being able to hear the final whistle in front of the dozens of fans who had stuck it out through nearly three hours of stopping and starting.

Perhaps that made the Spirit hungrier. Parsons and Diana Matheson both talked afterwards about wanting to hear that final whistle. And this time, they did — in front of more than 4,000 fans. (Only a handful of the 4,549 got out to beat traffic.)

Several of us have said over the course of the season that the Spirit, beset by bad karma all season, just needed a little luck to get a good result or two. You could say they got it Wednesday, though it’s worth reiterating that the Spirit played well enough to win.

Saturday night, no luck was needed. It wasn’t a dominant performance, of course, but the Spirit created the better chances. Seattle coach Laura Harvey cited the long road trip for her team’s disappointing performance, but she wasn’t making excuses or disputing that Washington deserved the result.

The Spirit did with a lot of heart, certainly, but also with some tactical and technical shrewdness. Parsons’ formation was described several ways — 4-2-1-2-1, 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3. The bottom line was that the Spirit used two holding mids, Lori Lindsey and Julia Roberts, instead of one. Between their efforts and a solid back line, with Marisa Abegg more than justifying her late-season addition, the Spirit held Seattle to very little. Some of the Reign’s shots were from distances that would challenge field-goal kickers. In a bright start to the second half, Jessica Fishlock had a low bending shot graze the post, but Ashlyn Harris otherwise had little trouble.

The formation tweak, Parsons said, helped to free Diana Matheson and Lupita Worbis in the attack. Worbis spent much of the game being roughed up by Fishlock (fans noticed), who came into the game one yellow card shy of a suspension and will play the season finale only through the bottomless benevolence of referee Kari Seitz. But Matheson had a superb game. The Canadian midfielder was a revelation in the early going this season, slowed a bit after the international break, then reasserted her all-league claim in the last couple of games.

Stephanie Ochs and Conny Pohlers weren’t always on the same page, and Pohlers waved her arms so hard to plead for the ball that I thought her arms might pop out. But they combined well in the 32nd minute. A sweet ball from Lori Lindsey hit Pohlers, who played it wide to Ochs. The tall youngster cut toward the center and played the ball back to Pohlers, who had one of the neatest finishes past Hope Solo you’ll ever see. The only problem: She was offside.

“Before I knew it, Lloyd (Yaxley) was jumping all over me,” Parsons said. “I looked for the linesman’s flag. I always do that — everything’s gone against us. Before we scored, I saw the flag going up. Lloyd’s going mental, and I said, ‘Lloyd, no chance. We’ll get it in the second half.’”

Pohlers also was denied by a world-class save from Solo at the left post. Matheson set up that one and another chance late in the half, where Lindsey passed up a shooting opportunity and played ahead in the box to Pohlers, who was wide open but couldn’t control the pass.

Matheson kept making good plays in the second half as the rest of the attacking cast changed. Pohlers departed to a warm ovation, drawing an overhead clap from the German forward in response. Tiffany McCarty played a couple of nice crosses from the right wing. A Robyn Gayle shot was blocked by a probable handball; Seitz kept the whistle quiet there and on a similar scene in the Spirit box.

Maybe Matheson was a little lucky to get the ball for the goal. A loose ball bounced around — as Matheson put it, it took “a few bounces” and went “off a few shins.” But the finish was simply top-quality. From an acute angle, she had only a tiny bit of net at the far post she could hit if she wanted to get the ball past Solo. And that’s what she did.

Solo seemed quite bitter afterwards, but she did talk about a touching moment before the game, when she and Ali Krieger met a young cancer patient whose name, coincidentally, is Hope. Solo said she does a lot of meetings like this, “but this one’s special. Maybe she touched me in a certain way, maybe (because) her name was Hope, maybe it was just a sweet family with three sweet kids. It was very touching.”

It’s not physically possible for Solo and Rapinoe to sign autographs for every single person who asked. But on the whole, I think all the fans went away happy. The low score didn’t do justice to the amount of action in the game. The weather was perfect, which everyone especially appreciated after Wednesday’s annoyances.

And it’s the first crowd this season to see the Spirit celebrate at the final whistle.

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Washington Spirit vs. Seattle: The vigil continues

Posted on by Beau Dure

That’s what it is now, isn’t it? A vigil?

A vigil for the first win since May or even the first run-of-play goal since May. A vigil for Conny Pohlers to convert one of the opportunities she’s getting in increasing numbers. A vigil for Stephanie Ochs, lauded by every broadcaster as a fantastic talent, to turn one of her near-misses into a goal. A vigil for Diana Matheson to be as influential as she was in the Spirit’s promising start.

It’s no longer a vigil for personnel. Pohlers and Toni Pressley have arrived, and Mark Parsons has taken over as coach. For all the knocks on the Spirit’s reliance on young, local players, the only such players in the lineup yesterday were Julia Roberts and Kika Toulouse. The other second-year players in the lineup — Pressley, Ochs and Tori Huster — didn’t go to high school or college anywhere near the SoccerPlex, and they were key players for the WPSL Elite champion Western New York Flash last season.

It may be a vigil for health. Caroline Miller and Colleen Williams are already gone for the season. We don’t know when Robyn Gayle will return. Yesterday, Ali Krieger went off after a clash of heads, and Candace Chapman was down for a while after twisting awkwardly on the turf. Wouldn’t it be just the Spirit’s luck to see their offense come together at last, only to see the defense run out of healthy players?

Going back to preseason, I thought the Spirit would have the season the Reign is having — a dreadful start, then a promising streak. The Spirit surprised a lot of people early. Now all those same people are clucking, “I told you so.” I hate cynicism.

The slump’s timing was bad. Had the team hit the reset button going into its three-week break, everyone would have had time to work together on a new direction. Instead, the Spirit came out of that break playing terribly, and the reboot started after one game of a murderous stretch of five games in 17 days. As the sharp Fox Soccer broadcast team of Steve Cangialosi, Lori Walker and Heather Mitts pointed out, this team has had no time to practice.

But in some respects, the Spirit’s path forward is clearer. It’s about next year now. Chicago and Seattle now believe they can make the playoffs. After seeing both of those teams and the Holy Cow Did You See The Thorns-Flash Game in the past week, I’m not sure the Red Stars or Reign can rise to the level of the top four. Maybe another team will drop — FC Kansas City could implode in the wake of Chicago’s comeback yesterday, or Portland could become as bad as its critics think — but I’m still of the mindset that Boston’s the most likely team to sneak into the playoffs if someone collapses.

Building for next year, though, could further tax the patience of the Spirit’s terrific fanbase. Despite all the losses, the team has terrific chemistry now, and if the lineup stayed intact, it should get a couple of wins by the end of the season. But are those couple of wins the goal? Or is it a thorough evaluation of the players on hand, throwing out a couple of unusual lineups to let players audition to keep their places for next season?

One irony here: There’s an Internet meme that Spirit management doesn’t care about winning as long as the seats are full. Let me see if I can put this nicely: That’s ridiculous. You don’t bring in Conny Pohlers and Toni Pressley, then fire the coach, if you don’t care. If it’s all about the fans instead of the record, you don’t cut Domenica Hodak. They expected some early struggles, and perhaps they were too confident they could weather the storm until reinforcements arrived. They may have overpaid on particular players. But they care about winning. (And we have to repeat — the allocation process was not kind to them. They were playing catch-up from Day 1.)

And yet they’re in a place now in which winning now may be less important than preparing for next season.

So which do you emphasize? (I don’t know — that’s why I have comments here.)

I do have one bit of advice for Spirit fans. You’re underdogs. Embrace it. Keep up the constructive criticism, but don’t just look for easy ways to place blame within the organization. The allocations were unfair. The refs are unfair. The injuries are unfair. And people from elsewhere sneer about this team, griping all week that the Spirit game shouldn’t have been on TV. Everyone’s written this team off (except the Fox Soccer commentary team). Blame them. Certain WNT players thrive on striking back against mysterious “haters” — maybe it’ll work for the Spirit as well.

You’ve already built a terrific fan experience. It’s the best party in western Montgomery County.

So call it the Beer Garden Vigil. Down but not out. Patient but defiant.

In the meantime, here’s yesterday’s recap: Good 25 minutes for the Spirit, with Matheson converting a deserved penalty kick. Two defensive lapses in three minutes. A lot of chasing the game after that, with a couple of good opportunities squandered. 2-1 Reign. Game over. Time for rest, recovery and rebuilding.

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Washington Spirit at Seattle: Battle of the unluckys

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’ll have to confess that I didn’t stay up to watch the Spirit’s late-night game at Seattle last night. I won’t belabor my scheduling problems, but it simply made more sense for me to get up and watch it on demand this morning, thanks to the NWSL’s nice YouTube archive:

And this might be the way I approach games I don’t see myself. I’m not there to gather quotes, and I haven’t seen much reaction to the game except this from Seattle coach Laura Harvey (via SoccerWire’s Liviu Bird):

“We concede stupid goals. We just let teams back into games, and we keep doing it.”

And that sums it up. The Spirit won 4-2, and it wasn’t even Washington’s best performance of the season.

Seattle struck early in each half, and each time, a Washington defender was nowhere in sight. The Reign’s Lindsay Taylor neatly chest-trapped the ball in front of Ingrid Wells and hammered the ball past a stunned Ashlyn Harris in the seventh minute to give Seattle a 1-0 lead. In the second half, with Washington leading 2-1, Seattle’s Christine Nairn played a ball into the air for Teresa Noyola, who was marked only by the 5-foot-0-and-change Diana Matheson.

Credit Taylor and Noyola for terrific finishes, but the Spirit may need to figure out what happened defensively on those plays and a couple more, including one in which Noyola and another Reign player had half the box to themselves. Seattle had too easy of a time getting the ball into empty space.

Seattle, though, has more difficult defensive questions to answer. Losing Katie Deines early in the game didn’t help, but the goal that put Washington in the lead was embarrassing — Michelle Betos made the first save off Lori Lindsey’s free kick, only to see Ali Krieger pop up in front of her for the rebound. Betos made another save, but Krieger still had time to leap and nod the ball into the net. The Reign players in the box simply failed to react.

The best part for the Spirit: The chances were converted. Robyn Gayle found Matheson deep in the Reign’s half of the field, and the Canadian dynamo lashed it past Betos at a tough angle. Tiffany McCarty, who made a good case for remaining in the starting lineup, beat three defenders with one touch and clinically finished. And Tori Huster showed why she’s been getting such (Ow! Ooof!) attention on set pieces, finishing with a glancing header when the Reign defense lost her on a free kick.

The bottom line: Washington is a young team, as we’ve said over and over again. Getting that first win is just the boost of confidence they needed. This was a battle between two teams that have been dealt a good bit of misfortune — take all the players each team had from allocations and the drafts, and you’d make two drastically different starting lineups. (A Garciamendez-Noyola matchup would have been fun!)

Now on to Portland, where it’s virtually impossible to imagine a visiting team wi … wait … what?

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