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The Portland Thorns proved me wrong.
I wasn’t especially optimistic about the team going into Friday’s match against the Orlando Pride. And I wasn’t alone.
“I kind of don’t like to say this, but typically the Thorns are like the New York Yankees of the NWSL,” said Fran Poodry, who’s been a Thorns season ticketholder for close to a decade. Though she’s not a Yankees fan, she draws a comparison—both teams are “engineered to do well.”
“And then that fell apart this year,” she added, heading into Providence Park for what felt like a doomed match with Orlando. “I’m still going to be a fan because I love the Thorns, but this has been a rough year.”
Poodry touches on what’s been most frustrating about the ups and downs of the season. It sucks to watch Portland lose games and play uninspired soccer when you know they can be better.
It could’ve been tactics—the Thorns were playing a somewhat uninspired brand of soccer and often built up the flanks, which made them easier for opponents to contain—and some of it was certainly due to the injuries of key players. But whatever the reason, the Thorns looked defeated, like they were simply going through the motions. And they kept losing games.
Portland was barely hanging on to a playoff spot in the NWSL standings and hadn’t found a win in their last seven matches. Orlando, on the other hand, hadn’t lost a regular season game all year.
And then, last Friday night, something shifted.
It seemed Orlando had picked up on the fact that the Thorns were struggling; they started a rotated lineup against Portland (Pride head coach Seb Hines had opted not to start stars like Marta, Barbra Banda and Emily Sams). Whether that was a strategic move on their part—you don’t get many opportunities to rest key players during the NWSL regular season, and the Pride had secured a first-place finish in the league with their victory the weekend before—or Orlando simply underestimated their opponents, it still stung they didn’t deem Portland worthy of facing their first team.
From the beginning of the match, though, it looked like the Thorns had figured something out.
“It’s hard to go through what we’ve been through and still show up and fight,” Sam Coffey said in the postgame presser. “Orlando, unbeaten, what are our chances? But we showed up. We knew we could do it. We believed in each other, and why not us?”
There was an intensity to the team that had been missing for the past couple of months. On more than one occasion early in the match, Nicole Payne lost the ball—and then she made the recovery run to win it back. She wasn’t alone; from the get-go, the Thorns looked committed to disrupting Orlando’s game and remaining on the front foot. A handful of the match’s stat lines reflect this energy—for instance, Portland had 12 interceptions on the night to Orlando’s three—but what really cemented it was Morgan Weaver’s 13th-minute goal to put her team ahead early on.
She grabbed the front of her jersey to show off the Thorns crest. It felt like Portland actually had a fighting chance.
And fight they did. Portland (via Christine Sinclair) went on to put up a second goal right after halftime and held the shutout. Coffey showed up to the postgame presser with turf-burn scratches along her right forearm. It was, in the words of head coach Rob Gale, a “team performance, front to back, start to finish.” The Thorns did “everything we’ve been asking of them: being brave, connecting through the midfield, focusing on performance not outcome.
“It showed tonight,” Gale told the media after the match. “Huge credit to the players.”
It was cathartic to watch Portland end their winless run by snapping another team’s undefeated streak, to see every player on the field committed to leaving everything out there, for the Thorns to play the game we knew they could against a top opponent.
There are still two games left in the regular season, and while Portland is sitting in a playoff position, they aren’t guaranteed a spot in the postseason yet. But the performance they showed against Orlando was encouraging at the very least, especially after seven matches in which the Thorns couldn’t find a win for the life of them.
At best, the win marks another turning point for Portland’s season, one that couldn’t come at a better time. Coffey’s show of elation as the final whistle sounded, arms above her head, jumping, said it all. That night, the Thorns were so back.
Next Match at Racing Louisville FC - 4:30 PM Saturday, Oct 19