NC Courage sent home early, upset by Portland and upset with itself
Playing for any kind of a championship in the NWSL without the NC Courage — even this ad hoc tournament during a pandemic — feels more than a little off. There’s something regular and familiar and expected missing, like Thanksgiving without turkey.
The NWSL will presumably go on and crown the closest thing it’s likely to have to a champion this season even without its most dominant franchise, because for the first time in forever and ever, the Courage are done before the final whistle. Undone by its own profligate finishing and a stand-in goalkeeper having the day of her life — and maybe even the impossibly high standards of its otherwise unimpeachable manager Paul Riley — the Courage fell 1-0 on Friday to the Portland Thorns, the closest thing the Courage has to a rival stateside but even then a shadow of its once proud self these days.
“We haven’t felt it in a while,” goalkeeper Katelyn Rowland said. “Sometimes it’s good to have this feeling.”
Portland didn’t win a game in the preliminary round of the NWSL Challenge Cup and the Courage didn’t lose one — including a 2-1 Courage win in the tournament’s opening game — but that all went out the window in the quarterfinals, in what Riley said he thought was the best performance of the five games.
The Courage, as usual, dramatically outplayed the opposition. The Courage, unusually, didn’t find a way to win, not through its early domination and not through the kind of late flurry that has so often proven decisive.
Two championships later, the Courage hasn’t really lost an NWSL game that matters since the 2017 title game. It shouldn’t have lost this one. But it did, and that’s an unusual reality for the Courage to have to reconcile now.
“Last time we lost, we came back for three years and just absolutely dominated,” Courage captain Abby Erceg said. “I think for the new girls coming in, it’s good for them to remember this because it hurts a lot. Losing’s never fun but when you lose in a big game like this you tend to remember it. So hopefully we come back just as strong as we did last time this happened.”
Lynn Williams had three point-blank chances in the early minutes to put the game away before it ever really got started, and Debhina had a pair in the final 20 minutes after the Courage fell behind, but neither could get anything past goalkeeper Britt Eckerstrom, pressed into unexpected service because of an injury. Eckerstrom’s sprawling, leaping save of a Debinha free kick ticketed for the upper left corner in the 79th minute was the best of her eight saves, but the Courage should have done better with its 21 shots.
Portland’s goal came with none of that flair, a loose ball in the box booted home in the midst of a curiously inattentive Courage defense.
The failure of the Courage to mount one of its frenetic late rallies did open Riley to some rare second-guessing over his decision to play his regulars heavily throughout the preliminary round, including the more-or-less meaningless fourth game. His unwillingness to compromise is unquestionably essential to what has made the Courage great; in these very narrow circumstances, it may actually have held them back in the Utah altitude and heat.
It’s strange to even question Riley but that’s partly because there are so rarely any questions to ask. The Courage has made excellence look so easy, so commonplace, that an unlikely result like this is actually a reminder just how hard what it has done has actually been.
It took Eckerstrom’s out-of-body performance to underline how fragile such dominance really is.
“I thought she played phenomenal,” Erceg said. “She had a great game. To come out like that and play against a team that was expected to win, all credit to her at the end of the day.”
Even in defeat, Erceg wasn’t conceding any ground, but as the NWSL plays on, the Courage will be doing something it hasn’t done in what feels like forever: Sit on the sidelines and watch.
