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Enough with the nail-biting. The Portland Thorns have qualified for the NWSL playoffs and will square off against NJ/NY Gotham FC in their quarterfinal match. That’s thanks to a dominating 3–0 win over Angel City in their last regular season game, a home victory that they effectively secured in the first half-hour of the match.
“Going into the playoffs having that energy and that momentum, it makes a huge difference,” Thorns defender Becky Sauerbrunn said at the team’s postgame press conference. “You look at teams in the past that have squeaked their way into playoffs and then gone very far, if not won the whole thing.”
Sauerbrunn’s right: The Thorns can ride momentum going into the postseason, and it could very well be a game changer. But in a season of “buts” and asterisks and contradictions for Portland, I’m not ready to declare the Angel City win marks a turning point for the team just yet.
After all, at no point this year has Portland made things easy for themselves.
The Thorns’ sixth-place finish is tied for their worst in franchise history. (To be fair, sixth place in 2015 was by any reasonable measure the lower finish, since the league had nine teams rather than the 14 competing now, and 2015 marks the only season Portland failed to qualify for playoffs.)
Outside of a hot streak from April to July, the Thorns have struggled to find consistent results in league play. Those couple months were spurred by the introduction of Rob Gale as the team’s interim head coach, but the momentum didn’t carry forward once Gale was appointed to a permanent position.
That said, the Thorns were without many of their regular starters as the results started to slip, with Morgan Weaver, Sophia Smith and Hina Sugita all suffering injuries that kept them out for strings of games this season.
And Portland has found a couple of key wins—notably in the forms of last weekend’s victory over Angel City and the league-leading Orlando Pride on Oct. 11. The asterisk on the Pride game was that Orlando opted against starting a handful of their key players, but the Thorns still held their own and commanded the game once those players took the field in the second half. But that game was followed by an unfortunate loss to Racing Louisville, and both the Orlando and Los Angeles wins have taken place at Providence Park. When the Thorns face Gotham, it will be on the other side of the country at Red Bull Arena, just off the Passaic River in New Jersey.
The undisputed positive, though, is that Portland’s attack is back at full strength. Sugita finally saw her return to the pitch against Angel City last weekend and assisted the Thorns’ third goal of the night. The match’s goal scorers—Christine Sinclair, Smith and Weaver—were all on the pitch and in form, and Portland will need them to build on that performance against Gotham.
It’s shaping up to be an interesting matchup between the only two teams to beat the first-seeded Pride this year. The New Jersey/New York side is coming off an excellent run of form, having outscored opponents 15–4 in their past five games. Portland, on the other hand, has been shaky, to say the least. But the Thorns are still a talented team, made even more so by the recent returns of Smith and Sugita—and by Sinclair, 41 years old and in her last season with the Thorns, doubling her season’s goal count in Portland’s past three games. If Portland can channel the way they played against Orlando and Los Angeles, they’ll have a fighting chance.
“It’s playoffs,” Weaver said last weekend. “Nobody’s won, nobody’s lost in playoffs. It sounds kind of funny to say, but it’s a start-over of the season. And now it’s you win, you go on; you lose, you’re out.”
It’s time for the Thorns to show they’re ready.
