Both of them are soooo fast, wow, love to watch them. I saw Press, when a Red Star, in person many times and she is magical with her speed. I will inject Kerr into the conversation. I don't know how Kerr compares actual foot speed but Kerr is also super fast. Seeing her on counters/receiving a medium or long pass I do not recall many at all being able to catch Kerr in a foot race!
I regret this tourney is not enough time for CRS to gel with them having so many quality goal scorers (like never before, quantity-wise). Despite being less speedy than the Courage, I think each line could match up well against the Courage. Will be interesting to see the line-up against the Courage this weekend.
Reminds me of Adama Traore. He goes too fast and doesn’t pass or shoot well either because his teammates don’t catch up and not in the box yet to receive or he doesn’t use football intelligence to assess the situation better.
But he improved as well. Hopefully Lynn is the same. Surprised that you said Christen Press know how to handle her speed in 2 years or so now. Was expecting at least 10 years.
It may have taken her ten years but she finally showed that she had learned about two years ago. Her first real show of her mastery of her speed came in her first appearance in the last WWC although she showed flashes in the runup. I have, in the past, compared her to Josh Wolff on the men's side. Wolff never really became "soccer smart" and consistently kill attacks that looked very promising. When her soccer brain finally caught up with her speed she almost instantly became one of the best forwards on the USWNT. I like to think that my, and other's, criticism (OK almost all other people as I am a correctly non-entity to her) drove her to work even harder to prove us wrong. If I was picking a team to win the WWC at this time I would pick her third or fourth and just a couple of years ago she would have been down at 20th or so.
We had a discussion of speed back in early July of 2016 involving Lynn Williams, Shade Pratt (U of Maryland, Sky Blue, now Braga), Leah Galton( Sky Blue, now Man Utd) Jess McDonald, and I think Ally Courtnall (UCLA, now modeling professionally). I think I want to look at some of the younger players who have come into the league who have track backgrounds and maybe update the list. https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/2016-season-—-week-11-p-i-p.2033211/page-2 The 2016 discussiont included this:
You'll notice I never said NCC lacked skill, simply saying they are faster than any other team. Every team in the nwsl has skill, but not every team or any team has the overall speed of NCC.