Soccer

NWSL Week 10 preview and fixtures: Reign and FC Kansas City try to climb back into the playoff conversation

Seattle and Kansas City were once two of NWSL’s great teams. Now, facing each other, both have a chance to start to find a way back.

by Lauren Barker

Jun 24, 2017, 3:20 PM UTC

Photo by Steve Dykes/Getty Images

It happened twice, which in a still-young league is basically always. Enough that it almost seemed like a foregone conclusion. Whatever happened during the regular season, in the end, it would be Seattle and Kansas City.

The Reign, following a dismal inaugural season, carried an unbeaten season into July, eventually finishing 2014 with just two losses, a record 50 goals scored, an NWSL shield, and a trip to the championship game. Kansas City’s story that year, though less impressive on paper, ended in the same place: with an appearance in the title game. The Blues, unlike the Reign, had at least played a playoff game before, in 2013, though it had ended badly, with Portland coming back from two goals down to force extra time before getting the winner in the 103rd minute.

In the 2014 championship game, it was FCKC that claimed the victory, a 2-1 win over a Seattle team that up until then had been as close to perfect as any team’s gotten either before or since.

The following year, 2015, Seattle was slightly less perfect, but still finished atop the table, with another NWSL shield, and eventually, another chance at a championship trophy. The problem for the Reign was that as they went, so did Kansas City. The Blues also made it back to the title game in 2015, though like Seattle, they’d fallen a little, finishing in a then-club worst third.

History, of course, has a way of repeating itself, and so with Seattle and Kansas City again meeting in the championship game, the result was ultimately the same, with the Blues claiming a second-straight NWSL title, this time with a 1-0 win.

But where the seams had started to fray a little for both teams in the 2015 season, by the following year, a giant tear had appeared that not even the most experienced tailor could fix. Seattle and FC Kansas City, once — or twice — foregone conclusions and teams to beat, were, in 2016, both shadows of their former selves. For the first time ever, FC Kansas City failed to make the playoffs, finishing a franchise-worst sixth. Seattle, with a fifth place finish, was also absent from the postseason for the first time since the 2013 season, a time when the Reign finished seventh in an eight team league.

This year, with nine games played, neither is a top four team. Heading into this weekend, the Reign is in fifth, two points behind the fourth place Thorns. Kansas City is in seventh, a point back of Seattle and three behind Portland. Following a 2-2 draw last weekend in Kansas City, the two will meet for the second time this season on Saturday night, this time in Seattle.

Since the last time Seattle and FCKC met in a championship game, both have struggled in mostly explicable ways. Kansas City lost eight key players, either to pregnancy, trade or retirement, following the 2015 championship win. Seattle struggled with injury issues last season, as well as a little off-field drama involving a certain goalkeeper. This year, for the first time since 2014, the Reign is also without all-time leading scorer Kim Little, who returned to Arsenal, the club she’d been with before coming to Seattle three years ago. And both teams suffered some from the requisite roster shuffling brought on by the Olympics.

This year, Seattle’s season hasn’t been bad, exactly, it just hasn’t quite lived up to expectations. Beyond losing Little, Seattle’s mostly stayed in tact from the Reign teams of the past, including the ones that were winning NWSL shields with relative ease. Now, there’s no Olympics (or World Cup) to contend with, and the injury issues that plagued the team last season — including long absences from Jess Fishlock and Megan Rapinoe — are all resolved. The only significant name consistently missing from Seattle’s game day rosters now is Diana Matheson, who’s still recovering from an ACL tear, but Matheson was only acquired by the Reign in January — she’s never played a game for the team.

Through nine games, Seattle’s only lost twice and leads the league in scoring, two things which, in a normal season, would probably put the Reign somewhere near the top of the table. In fact, two of top four teams — North Carolina and Sky Blue — have both lost more than the Reign. Seattle’s problem, at least as far as the points and on-paper stuff goes, is that they’re not winning a lot, either. Through nine games, Seattle’s won just three times. That Seattle is in fifth is mostly thanks to a league-high four draws.

Mostly, Seattle’s problem seems to go back to that old trope we often roll out to explain why the USWNT doesn’t look good without admitting it’s because they might be bad: the rest of the world, or in this case the league, is catching up. The Reign’s midfield was once an unstoppable force, their buildup out of the back so quick it left other teams flatfooted. There have been flashes of those things this season too, including on Seattle’s second goal last weekend, but everyone else is also playing a higher pressure game, making that stuff that much more difficult to execute with any regularity. A lot of Seattle’s problems now are on the defensive end, with the Reign too often having to rely on Haley Kopmeyer to make big saves to keep the team in games. Kopmeyer currently leads the league in saves.

Last week, with Kopmeyer facing Nicole Barnhart, the two combined for a series of bizarre goalkeeping miscues. Kopmeyer, in an effort to tip the ball over the bar on a shot from Alexa Newfield, never got enough on it and ended up helping the ball into the net. She also was responsible for a bad turnover that could have been a goal if not for Shea Groom shooting wide. Barnhart had an equally curious night, with Seattle’s first goal, from Rapinoe, kind of just bouncing under and through her. Later, Barnhart got caught way out of the goal after making a save and failing to hold onto the ball, leaving Seattle with two more chances at shots, this time the saving grace that neither were particularly dangerous and both were easily cleared by the FCKC defense.

These things — the miscues from Barnhart, allowing two goals in a game — are something of an anomaly for Kansas City, though. Where the Reign has had to rely on Kopmeyer quite a bit, Barnhart actually hasn’t seen a ton of work this season. Kansas City’s defense is still one of the league’s best — through nine games the Blues have allowed just nine goals, and two of those came last week. Kansas City’s problems instead come from them playing as some sort of opposite Seattle. That is, the Blues can’t score. Where FCKC’s only allowed nine goals this season, they’ve also only scored nine goals this season. The only two teams that are worse in that department are Boston and Houston, and the Breakers and Dash are in ninth and tenth places, respectively.

Of course, things weren’t supposed to be this way for Kansas City this season. The Blues, finally with a full compliment of very capable forwards thanks to the returns of both Amy Rodriguez and Sydney Leroux following pregnancies, got off to a strong start too, with a 2-0 lead 48 minutes into the season’s first game. That’s also about when things started to fall apart for FCKC. Rodriguez’ first goal of the season quickly became her last. After making it 2-0 in the 48th minute, A-Rod went down injured in the 55th, eventual diagnosis: season ending-ACL tear.

The loss of A-Rod has been a huge one for FCKC, and it’s something they still haven’t entirely recovered from. Immediately following the loss of Rodriguez, Leroux, who was responsible for the other goal in the season opener, all but disappeared. The midfield suddenly lacked cohesion, offering little in the way of service for Leroux or anyone else, and struggling to do much going forward that wasn’t incredibly disjointed. After scoring twice in week one, Kansas City scored a total of two goals through the next five games.

The Blues have looked better lately, with the natural progression of a team coming together through the course of a season starting to put FCKC back on the right track, however slowly. Through the last five, Kanas City’s lost just once.

Saturday’s match is important for a lot of reasons, the most obvious being that a win for either team comes with a possible move up the table, and maybe — with some help in other games — finally breaking back into the top four. And as we close in on the halfway point in the season, every point becomes that much more valuable. Neither team has a particularly easy schedule in the coming weeks, either. Both Kansas City and Seattle will play three of their next five games after Saturday against current top four teams.

Beyond the points and potential moves upward, there’s more at stake on Saturday though. It’s also a chance for someone to make a statement: “it’s been a while, but we’re on the way back.”

All times Eastern