NWSL Week 8 preview: Boston Breakers acknowledge that they have a problem

Do you remember where you were the day the Boston Breakers won their first game of the 2016 season? It was a Sunday, May 22, somewhere around 8:30 pm on the East Coast. To watch it felt good, and right. And yeah, maybe it stung a little -- knowing that it came at the expense of FC Kansas City -- to see that that giant was now in some kind of real crisis, like Gulliver tied down by so many Lilliputians in Breakers blue.

But still, it felt good, and you were happy for Boston, the feeling of the weight of loss after loss finally being lifted coming straight out of your computer screen and somehow managing to penetrate a heart hardened and cynical after so many years and so many different leagues.

This was the beginning of something new. After so many weeks of “almost” and “unlucky,” the Breakers were finally on the road to ... I don’t know. Somewhere. Two roads, they diverge in a yellow wood, one leads to not last place, and that makes all the difference. The other road leads to Western New York, and like Robert Frost -- a man who died in Boston -- once told me in a different poem that I also had to memorize in elementary school, dawn goes down to day, the Breakers lose 4-0 to the Flash the following week, nothing gold can stay. I think that’s how it went.

So what happens after you’ve finally won a game, gotten all filled up with hope and then immediately followed it up with your worst performance of the season? You have your head coach, who is a man named Matt Beard, post an open letter on your website that’s roughly the length of “The Road Not Taken,” though harder to memorize because there’s not one part that rhymes. The gist of said letter: we are bad, we know we are bad, we are trying to be not as bad, we are working hard to be not the worst by the end of the season.

The letter, while probably sincere, also reads like the auto-response your cable company sends after you fill out one of those online help desk requests. We’re working on it. There are technicians in the area. We’ve dispatched Eunice Beckmann. We hope to have service at least partially restored by the time we play Washington on Friday night.

The Breakers do play the Spirit on Friday, and while a win would be a huge boost for a Boston team that’s in a pretty bad place right now, it’s not going to be easy. Though the Spirit has dropped into third after spending much of the season atop the table, Washington is still one of the league’s best teams. There are few bits of hope for Boston. Beckmann didn’t look that bad in her debut two weeks ago, and she’d only had limited time with the team coming into that game. With the international break, Beckmann’s now had a few solid weeks to train with the Breakers. And Boston also gets Whitney Engen back. Engen was away with the USWNT two weeks ago, and the Breakers definitely missed her in the back line.

Right now, Boston is still in last place, and while they’ve already got a difficult road ahead as far as playoffs go, the less lofty goal of just getting out of the basement is still attainable. But even that becomes less and less likely the further into this thing we get. Beard’s letter, cable company help desk tone aside, was a good start as far as someone acknowledging that there is a real problem, but that something is bad in Boston -- and has been for a while -- is hardly a secret to anyone who’s followed the league even a little bit. The halfway point of the season isn’t technically for another two weeks, but for Boston it has to start now, with a good performance against the Spirit. The Breakers are still not as bad as their record would lead you to believe, but they’ve got to take Beard’s letter to heart and show that they believe that too.

Have you ever wondered how the NWSL schedule gets made? It’s like this: every February, someone in the league office places a call to the Psychic Friends Network. They ask, “is there a random weekend in June where we can have a majority of the games be ones where each of the two teams playing are next to each other on the table, separated by a single point or less?” Then Dionne Warwick goes and gets someone and they do some things with a crystal ball that us common people wouldn’t understand, and voilà, we get the schedule. And here you thought they used some fancy scheduling software. Well, times are tight and software is expensive. That $3.99 a minute is a bargain.

At least, I think that’s how it works. It’s the only explanation I can come up with for this week’s slate of games, three of which are between teams that are next to each other in the table. One of them -- Sunday’s meeting between Seattle and Houston -- is pretty inconsequential. The Dash and Reign are in eighth and seventh respectively, with just a single point separating them, but neither can crack the top four regardless of what happens this weekend.

The other two are both games with playoff implications, and while we’re only in week eight, we’re also inching ever-closer to the halfway point of the season, and as Olympic preparations start to ramp up, points gained now could be key come September.

The first is Orlando’s trip to Western NY on Saturday. Currently it’s the Pride that hold the fourth and final playoff spot, but the two teams are actually even on points, with 12 each and identical 4-3-0 records (Orlando gets the higher spot thanks to a better head-to-head record against Western NY).

The other game -- and probably the weekend’s biggest -- is Sunday’s meeting between Chicago and Portland at Toyota Park. The Red Stars are currently in first, but just a point up on the second place Thorns, who are also the season’s only remaining unbeaten team.

The Red Stars and Thorns are two different teams that have taken two different paths. Portland was the league’s darling out of the gate, and attracting all the best players paid instant dividends, with a championship win in 2013 and another playoff appearance a season later. But the Thorns fell apart in 2015, failing to even clinch a spot in the top four. And last year was when the Red Stars, for the first time in their history, finally made it to the postseason. Chicago is the build-from-within tortoise to Portland’s star-studded hare.

Chicago and Portland have a long history -- they’ve played each other nine times through the previous three seasons. The Red Stars have only managed to beat Portland once in those nine meetings, a 2-0 win in 2013. The Thorns have fared only slightly better though, winning three times, twice in 2013 and once last season. The other five games -- one each in 2013 and 2015 and all three in 2014 -- have all been draws. Overall, Portland has the edge in goals scored, but with 15 to Chicago’s 13, not by much.

There is an argument to be made here that maybe Chicago has simply caught up to the place where Portland was in the beginning. And perhaps that’s partially right, that all the things the Red Stars have done over the past three seasons -- consistency in re-signing players, drafting smart, throwing rookies into big games to sink or swim -- are just finally paying off. Patience, as if Rory Dames had a better version of Paul Riley’s fabled three-year plan. But to do that -- to say that Chicago was building itself to be some kind of homegrown version of Portland -- would be to discount the fact that Chicago was able to do all those things in the first place.

Maybe it’s the other way around, that the Thorns are in some ways finally catching up with the Red Stars. Under Mark Parsons, they’ve scrapped the zany defensive formations in favor of things like consistency, lineups that make sense and putting players in positions and situations where they’ll succeed. Portland is still Portland, full of big stars and still making flashy signings, but this season has also seen something of a shift in how the Thorns have played. While previous versions of the Thorns were determined to cram all of those names onto the field at once, sometimes seemingly just for the sake of doing it, this season’s team has found success through a more focused approach. It’s one that’s closer to what the Red Stars have been doing from the beginning, in fielding (and building) the team that works the best together rather than the one that just looks really good on paper.

This week marks the season’s first meeting between the two teams, but more importantly, it marks the first meeting between the two when both are firing on all cylinders. Given how close Red Stars-Thorns games have been historically, even when one or the other was struggling, and the fact that this one is a battle for first place, Sunday could be one of the best games we’ll see this season.