NWSL 2024 Week 11

As an aside, both NC and LA will be represented at TST this weekend, as will the Tampa Bay Sun of USLSL, with the highest-profile names among them* including Jess McDonald with NC and Formiga and Veronica Perez with Tampa Bay. (Of course, the USWNT and Wrexham will also be in the women's tournament, with their own high-profile names.)

 

What's with the big crowd for Gotham?

 

This setup in Chicago looks better than the Yankee Stadium setup.

 

NWSL After Dark — Sophia Smith picks up a 2nd YC and the red card while on the bench after subbing out (!)

best league in the world pic.twitter.com/cgRMLo0Qkk

— ugh (@838_carlisle) June 9, 2024

Honestly figured Sophia Smith would never get a red card in her entire life, but compliments to Ion for actually spotting her hiding the ball under the Thorns bench. #NWSL

— Jason Anderson (@JasonDCsoccer) June 9, 2024

Honestly figured Sophia Smith would never get a red card in her entire life, but compliments to Ion for actually spotting her hiding the ball under the Thorns bench. #NWSL

— Jason Anderson (@JasonDCsoccer) June 9, 2024

Yeah, that is pretty amazing that ION caught that on camera!

 

Thoroughly enjoyable game except for the marble mouthed oaf doing color commentary. Watching it on mute and only bringing up the sound for goal replays.

 

2-2 and feels like it could be more.

 

Someone should let the Reign know the second half started.

 

Yeah, big yikes there...

I think P+ has the rights for archiving, but that's definitely different rights than the live coverage

When your league attracts the "top talent" from the world, that usually means attacking talent. It's also a very American thing to prefer high-scoring offenses over tight defenses, as even MLS has this problem.

 

I do not criticize refs often, but I thought Danielle Chesky was abysmal in the Thorns v Courage game. From the beginning of the game, it looked to me like the Courage came to try to bludgeon the Thorns into submission (did not work). She let it go too much and the result was an ugly game in which she had to struggle to maintain control pretty much the whole time, with limited success and a tremendous amount of chippiness. She should know better and should have gotten control right away rather than letting it get out of hand. It wasn't simply a matter of physical play, it was a matter of players being put in danger.

My opinion of the Courage has dropped considerably, as it appeared physical and potentially dangerous play was part of their game strategy.

 

After this week's games, it looks like we have a top three, two chasers, two bottom-dwellers, and then fairly tight through the rest of the pack. If that holds up, it looks like we'll have good Shield and playoff-qualification races, less exciting playoff-hosting and wooden-spoon races. I kinda want to do an RPI or strength-of-schedule analysis to see if we can get any more refined of an analysis here...

 

You're going to have to show your work! (tee-hee!) I thought Chesky missed a possible yellow card early in the match, which could've spelled trouble (about 10'15 just after Fleming's shot from outside the box which Murphy hauled in for a save), and of course she needed VAR to spot the penalty in the 2nd half, but on the whole I thought it was a reasonably well-refereed match, very far from an "abysmal" job.

I reviewed the 1st half. Maybe there will be more problems in the 2nd half, but I mainly was bothered by the miss at 10'15 when Malia Berkeley half-lunged, half-slid, straight in at Hina Sugita who was positioned to block or steal the ball. Denise O'Sullivan was a bit feisty for North Carolina (maybe spent too much time with Katie McCabe while with Ireland on international break) and she wound up getting a yellow card in the 2nd half for Persistent Infringement, but I didn't see anything especially dangerous from her.

In an earlier thread I tried identifying useful indicators of a good referee. I think some of them apply to Chesky's first half

• Not over-reacting every time a player winds up on the ground / allowing normal physical play
• Not blowing the whistle too quickly but allowing time for advantage to develop
• The aesthetic test — is it an interesting and enjoyable contest to watch? Does it invite evaluation & analysis of the tactics and how well the players are playing? Does it invite the armchair coach in us?

It's important not to whistle a foul every time a player winds up on the ground. It simply encourages diving. There were a few notable times when it seemed very reasonable for Chesky to allow play to continue. eg

• 5'30 Smith goes down while shadowed by O'Sullivan. I see no foul on O'Sullivan, no reaching in with her foot which trips Smith
• 25'30 leading up to the yellow card on Ryan Williams, Sugita first looses footing while trying to pivot. Seems no contact. Then when North Carolina gives back possession, Sugita holds off Haley Hopkins, managing to get the pass off to Smith who gets fouled while off to the races. Again, I see no foul on Sugita but good physical play on both sides; Sugita does very well to get the pass off under pressure from Hopkins who is simply maintaining her angle and is under no obligation to simply concede the space)

***
Bodies appear to be flying in one sequence in the highlight video, so it's fair to wonder if there should be a foul in there at 45 +3 or 1'30 of the highlights

Narumi Miura slides in but she seems to simply block the ball; I'm not even positive she commits a foul, but maybe she keeps her boot up too high, too long. I don't know. At any rate, Chesky has a foul there but doesn't blow the whistle because she plays the advantage — and it ends up in a hard shot by Sophia Smith that Murphy has a hard time handling

***
It was an interesting match and an interesting first half. I'll have more to say about it later but perhaps this serves for an introduction.

The full replay is available on NWSL+ for free (at least in the US) with email registration

 

Interesting start! I do love the Elo family of rankings, especially since it is a family of calculations instead of a single computation. I personally like Elo-based rankings for soccer to include HFA and something more than the 1/0.5/0 result split to account for the degree of the game. And any Elo system, for almost any per-game points limit above a certain amount, is often quite volatile until each team has at least 20 games. I do quite love that Excel sheet, I may try tinkering around with something similar myself to get the extra details in.

Still, fun to see what differs even with the current list! Can definitely see that CHI and NC look worse in that Elo ranking, though I'm sure for NC at least it's because there isn't HFA factored into that current sheet. The gap between 6th and 7th in those rating is also quite large, 54pts directly around the original 1500; I wonder if not being able to hover around 1500 exactly is a consequence of the sharp 1/0.5/0 result divide.

 

I didn't want to get in the way of an interesting discussion on Elo ratings unfolding but now that it's established itself, I'd like to return to a point about the refereeing in Portland/North Carolina (CR: Danielle Chesky).

I mentioned what I call (for want of a better word) the Aesthetic Test. Perhaps we can call it the Tactical Analysis Test or Tactical Imperative, meaning is a referee letting one team get away with such negative cynical tactics that it's preventing their opponents from showing what they can do, or whether in waching the game, the emphasis is where it should be — on how good the players are, how well they're playing, and whether the game invites us to attempt more sophisticated tactical analysis.
What I'm suggesting is that you can look at any 5 to 10 minute segment of Portland / North Carolina and sit therer appreciating the quality of the game and the battle of talents and tactics. Sure in every 5 to 10 minute segment, there's players doing a couple naughty things

Since Portland is doing the accusing and North Carolina is the accused, let's point out this, North Carolina gains possession several times by clean interceptions; and then the possess and move the ball well, progressing through midfield. Portland has their opportunities, too — usually with Sophia Smith on the end of it, which is how Portland wants it — and she gets off shots or attempts at dribbling to the box or winning corners.
This is the kind of game where I expect to sense frustration on the part of Portland's fans (mainly in other parts of the internet; not so much here at BigSoccer where the Portland fans, as with the rest of the fans, are notably more sophisticated than elsewhere on the internet — tee-hee!) because they're not dominating a game they expect to win easily, at least at home. Who the bloody hell is North Carolina anyway, especially since Kerolin is out with a long term injury?

If Portland isn't winning by 2 goals at half time or at least have or 6 shots that should be goals, then North Carolina must be doing mean things to them that mean Denise O'Sullivan, all 100 pounds of her, should've earned a red card by now for all her attempts to injure Portland players.

Sorry, it's horse-pucky.That's the funny thing about North Carolina this season. They can't score but they're still a fundamentally good team

***
It's not just one way either. Two of the hardest challenges early in the game came from Portland's Kelly Hubly. In the first couple minutes, she comes up from behind to challenge for a header near midfield and sends Haley Hopkins flying, and Hopkins is a big girl (about 1'10 on the game clock)

Then there was the hard sliding tackle in the box by the endline on Tyler Lussi (about 22'45 Nice foray by Malia Berkeley, by the way, all the way up from her center back position to Portland's 18 yard box). I understand it's a play where defenders are given more latitude as long as they get the ball — because of course we don't want to call penalties left and right — but it's an interesting play to talk about sometime because not only is it a hard tackle but my initial impression was that Hubly almost scissored Lussi's leg.

But we understand it's almost never going to be called a penalty — and the challenge on Hopkins was so early in the match — so Portland gets a pass in terms of who's making hard tackles and in terms of setting the tone for physical play