NC Courage sneak into NWSL final while Portland Thorns get there in style

In the end, there would be drama after all. For nearly all 90 minutes of Sunday’s game between the North Carolina Courage and the Chicago Red Stars, things felt mostly subdued, strange almost, like the weight — the win-or-go-home-ness of the thing — hadn’t quite set in. A lot of it was choppy and disconnected. There were moments of urgency, sure, but a lot of it was turnovers and misplayed balls and shots not quite on frame. And after the previous games — both of the day before, when Portland beat Orlando 4-1, or last year’s semifinals, both of which required extra time — it felt kind of like a letdown.

North Carolina came into Sunday’s semifinal both having already won the NWSL Shield and somehow, like someone purposely setting all their clocks to 10 minutes earlier in some effort to avoid perpetual lateness, touting themselves as the underdogs. And against Portland, the team the Courage will face in next weekend’s championship game in Orlando, maybe North Carolina is still, in some strange way or on paper at least, the dark horse.

But against Chicago — and even against a Chicago team they lost to all three times the two met in the regular season, calling North Carolina underdogs seems, at the very least, inaccurate. And yet, that mentality, coupled with the same kind of late-game magic that’s become a somewhat overlooked trademark of these Paul Riley-led teams, ultimately worked.

The first time it happened was in 2010. Riley, then a relative unknown in the world of the professional women’s game, entered our lives as this three-piece suit-wearing guy from Liverpool who talked fast, sometimes hilariously, and endearingly mispronounced his own players’ names in postgame interviews (Vero Boquete, more than once, was referred to as something that sounded a lot like baguette), and somehow turned a group of other teams’ castoffs into something good.

Then, Riley had come on board as the first head coach for the Philadelphia Independence. The Independence, along with the Atlanta Beat, were Women’s Professional Soccer’s first foray into expansion, something that was at that point already more of a necessity for keeping the 2-year-old league afloat than anything that pointed towards actual growth.

Riley’s team didn’t play like an expansion team, or one built from random scraps, fresh start seekers, and relative unknowns, though. The Indys finished that first season in third, and then, thanks to WPS’ bizarre playoff format, won two road games in the course of a week to advance to the league’s title game. In the first of those games, Amy Rodriguez scored in the 120th minute to break a 0-0 deadlock with the Washington Freedom. Then it was on to Boston, where Danesha Adams handed the Breakers a loss with a goal in the 103rd minute.

The next time it happened was one league and five years later. It was, in fact, last season, when Riley took over in Western NY, a team that, though for very different reasons than what he’d walked into in Philly, also boasted a roster made in large part of rookies and second-chancers. Riley’s Flash team, though perhaps thankful for the NWSL’s less rigorous playoff format, again needed all 120 minutes and that same late-game stuff to keep the season alive. And they needed to do it twice.

There was, first, the epic semifinal in Portland, where Western NY, as the fourth seed, knocked off the Thorns in dramatic fashion, securing the eventual winner in a wild 4-3 game in the 104th minute and needing a save off the line from Abby Dahlkemper in the third minute of stoppage at the end of extra time to pull of the upset.

The second came a week later, in Houston, as the Flash took on Washington in the championship game. There, the Spirit saw its 2-1 lead evaporate with a goal from Lynn Williams in the 124th minute. Western NY would go on to win on PKs, and Riley — after losing two title games with Philly and having to watch this one from somewhere that wasn’t the sideline after being ejected during the game in Portland — would finally get his championship, too.

Then, maybe Western NY was actually the underdog. The fourth seed, the not exactly stacked roster. The late-game thing, the scrappy, never-say-die stuff, it fit with whatever the Flash, however unintentionally or out of pure necessity or maybe by default, was going for. Now though? Now it’s maybe a little harder to believe. And yet even after sitting atop the table, almost entirely uninterrupted, from opening weekend on to the end, Riley’s Courage, in a big game, still took it until about as late as you can go.

Of course, and perhaps thankfully, because really, Sunday’s game between the Courage and Red Stars wasn’t exactly pretty, North Carolina managed to at least do it within the regular, 90-minute amount of time. They just needed an 89th-minute goal from Denise O’Sullivan and a save off the line in stoppage time from Sam Mewis to get there.

Before things went relatively crazy, the two teams had played a disjointed game, neither looking particularly good for any significant amount of time. The Courage, for whatever it’s worth, was fairly dominant in every offensive category. North Carolina outshot Chicago 19-6. They had five shots on goal to the Red Stars’ one. Twenty-eight crosses, nine corner kicks, and the Courage controlled most of the possession, too. But still, the game was messy, with turnovers coming not from high and relentless pressure — the way we’ve grown accustomed to seeing games featuring North Carolina go — but rather through everyone, from both teams, spending a lot of time not quite on the same page, either defensively, or going forward.

And then came O’Sullivan, collecting the remnants of a failed corner kick at the top of the 18, and firing a shot through traffic, the ball deflecting off Julie Ertz and wrong-footing Alyssa Naeher on its way into the Chicago goal.

In many ways, O’Sullivan’s goal, a messy, kind-of fluky shot coming off a messy and broken set-piece chance that took a deflection off a defender, was exactly the kind of goal the game deserved. And that it was O’Sullivan, a fresh-start seeker in her own right, coming to North Carolina and Riley after being let go by Houston earlier this season — reportedly at her request after seeing her playing time diminish to almost nothing — felt somehow fitting, too.

Now, the Courage will take on Portland next weekend in Orlando in the first final since 2014 to feature the regular season’s first- and second-place finishers. No team has ever won the Shield and the championship game in the same season, though, and the Courage will have to go through a Thorns team that made no mistake about its path to the final.

Portland didn’t need 120, or 90, or 89 minutes to book its place in the title game. And unlike a season ago, things never really got crazy or turned into some wild scoring seesaw. Instead, Portland needed just 15 minutes. By then, the Thorns were already up 2-0, with Amandine Henry and Emily Sonnett giving Portland the early lead.

Orlando, the league’s highest-scoring team during the regular season, did answer back, and quickly, with Alanna Kennedy making it 2-1 in the 23rd minute. But for all the firepower the Pride has, and Orlando did outshoot Portland 13-11, they were also facing the NWSL’s toughest defense. After allowing a league-low 20 goals during the regular season, Portland made life difficult for Orlando on Saturday, repeatedly and effectively disrupting the Pride’s usually potent offense.

Portland got two more goals in the second half, from Hayley Raso and Christine Sinclair, making things feel a little more comfortable than they were the last time the Thorns appeared in a postseason game.

Portland’s comfort might be short-lived, though. Western NY may now be North Carolina, and, according to the league, officially in its first season, but the team that will face the Thorns next Saturday is almost identical roster-wise to the one that knocked Portland out of the playoffs a year ago.

Now, the Thorns will have a chance to earn a second trophy. It was the Flash that Portland beat to secure the inaugural league title back in 2013, but since then, the Thorns have failed to make it back to the title game. And unlike the Courage, the Thorns have never really been the underdogs, either legitimately or as some construct designed to coax the most out of their players. Portland, though coming into the title game as second seed to North Carolina’s first, won’t be the underdogs on Saturday, either. And neither will North Carolina, because these two teams, through 24 regular season games and one semifinal, are the NWSL’s two best.

Portland Thorns FC 4 - 1 Orlando Pride

North Carolina Courage 1 - 0 Chicago Red Stars