NC Courage playoff run ends with NWSL quarterfinal loss to Gotham FC
With her teammates beginning their warm-up stretches on Sunday night, Kerolin Nicoli strolled onto WakeMed Soccer Park with her knee brace swinging from her hands.
The MVP candidate embraced NC Courage head coach Sean Nahas and warmly greeted fans as she walked up to the stands. This is where she found herself sidelined during her team’s quarterfinal bout against Gotham FC due to a season-ending ACL tear suffered last weekend.
It’s safe to say that Kerolin’s teammates missed her presence on the field.
After failing to muster their usual offensive firepower, the Courage fell to Gotham FC, 2-0, in a season-ending loss. Despite a barrage of second-half substitutions, NC Courage failed to find any momentum — only registering four shots on goal throughout the entire match, all in the second half.
When asked if the Courage had trouble finding an offensive rhythm on Sunday, Nahas offered a resounding “No.”
“This is the thing, Kero’s one player of the team, guys,” he said. “We’re a team, and at the end of the day, we will loop in and lose as a team. We created a few chances. We didn’t find a way to score. That’s the bottom line.”
Courage captain Denise O’Sullivan was candid, saying Kerolin’s absence impacted the team “massively.”
“Kero just brings something different than everyone else,” O’Sullivan said. “I think when she gets on the ball, teams are scared. Automatically, they’re just scared of her. She dribbles past teams, she can go in behind, she has the ball at her feet — she can do everything. And she scores goals as well.”
“Scores goals” is an understatement for the NWSL Golden Boot runner-up who is second in the league with 10 goals.
Without Kerolin, the Courage lacked a consistent vertical threat to test the Gotham back line. And after conceding a goal to midfielder Delanie Sheehan, desperation began to set in.
In the second half, NC Courage’s play became — according to Nahas — chaotic.
“Every time we broke the line we got fouled,” Nahas said. “The ref never controlled it. That’s not a shock to me.”
The Courage moved players high up the field in an attempt to earn an offensive advantage, and there were several close calls. In the 78th minute, a right-footed shot from Brianna Pinto was saved. In the first minute of second-half stoppage, a Haley Hopkins header was blocked.
The downside of moving the Courage up the field? The play became more direct — a style that Nahas said “doesn’t really suit us” — and led to goals in transition.
“The faster you go forward, the faster it comes back,” Nahas said.
That was seen in Gotham’s final goal of the game, in which the club instantly found an answer to Hopkins’ attempted header less than a minute later. With Lynn Williams assisting, Yazmeen Ryan booted the ball into the bottom-left corner of the goal, putting Gotham up 2-0.
By then, even with the additional stoppage time, it was too late.
“We could never really get a grasp of the game in the second half,” Nahas said. “We never found the areas that we really wanted to make vulnerable.”
While Gotham moves on to the NWSL semifinals to face the second-seeded Portland Thorns, third-seeded NC Courage’s season comes to a screeching halt. It’s a loss that, while disappointing, certainly isn’t disheartening for a young Courage team that rosters only a handful of players with NWSL playoff experience.
Nahas was blunt in his postgame press conference: “No one is gonna tell me that this season wasn’t a success.”
“They put the club back on the map,” Nahas said. “They’ve had people speaking positively, let me repeat that word, positively. We didn’t find a way tonight, and that doesn’t define us.”
This story was originally published October 22, 2023 at 9:12 PM.