Soccer

NWSL Week 18 preview and fixtures: FC Kansas City can shake up playoff race against Orlando Pride

Kansas City and Orlando are two of the NWSL’s most in-form teams. They’ll face off on Saturday, both with winning streaks and playoff hopes on the line.

by Lauren Barker

Aug 25, 2017, 11:16 PM UTC

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When the schedule was announced at the beginning of March, FC Kansas City hosting Orlando probably wasn’t a game you’d have circled as a must-watch. And really, no one would’ve blamed you for being kind of confused by the decision to make that the week’s TV game, especially with the Cascadia derby happening the same day.

Even with whatever bold/dumb preseason predictions we might have made, or because of the undying belief — that unwritten prerequisite of being a fan of a team — that creeps up as the season gets closer, a late-August meeting between a team that hasn’t been good in a couple years and one that’s always been bad is, at best, background noise.

And yet, as we’re here, actually in late August and on the eve of those two teams facing off, FCKC taking on the Pride is about as far from a nothing game as you can get.

As recently as a month ago, both the Blues and the Pride were still mostly bad. Orlando had signed Marta, sure, and while they’d showed signs of life once their new star striker found her NWSL rhythm, it was also a pretty safe bet that the Pride’s season was already too far gone, especially with the teams at the top of the table all on tears that seemed unbreakable.

Kansas City, similarly, felt like a lost cause. Whatever hope the Blues had about finally getting out from the rut of losing so many players following the 2015 season was pretty much washed away entirely by the end of this season’s very first game, all of it carted off the field with Amy Rodriguez and her torn ACL.

Over the past few weeks though, Kansas City and Orlando have, however suddenly — and maybe surprisingly — both started to string together results. And now, as we enter the season’s homestretch — everyone but North Carolina and Washington will have just four games remaining after this weekend, and the Courage and Spirit will even that out when they face each other on Wednesday — the Pride is in the top four and FCKC’s making a late-season push of its own.

Orlando, currently in fourth, is unbeaten in four and has won three straight. Kansas City’s won three in a row, too. Both come into the weekend with a chance to change the playoff picture for not only themselves, but also the rest of the table.

Orlando’s never been a bad team, necessarily. Though it may seem like 100 years ago in Soccer Time, it was only last year that the Tom Sermanni-led Pride joined as the NWSL’s 10th team. And given the history of Houston, the league’s only other foray into expansion and a team that’s still, four years in, trying to find its way, that Orlando was able to only put out something mediocre, even as this season kicked off, was pretty much par for the course.

The way Orlando started this season, 1-3-3 in the first seven games, did little to inspire confidence in anything other than a repeat of last year’s ninth-place finish. The Pride didn’t even really play particularly poorly in any of those games, and that the one win came against North Carolina left at least a little hope. Chioma Ubogagu and Camila were bright spots even during that rough start, and until she was sidelined with an injury, Ashlyn Harris was still there, making poster-worthy saves with regularity. Mostly, Orlando just looked one or two steps off from being a truly competitive team.

The Pride made its first move toward getting out of Houston territory in late April, when the team announced they’d signed Marta. Casually adding the five-time FIFA Player of the Year to your roster is about as big a statement as a team could make, and suddenly, Orlando had a lot to say. Immediately, Marta was a solution for the absence of Alex Morgan, who’d gone to get a taste of the Champions League with Lyon in France. More long-term, once Morgan returned to Florida, the Pride would, on paper anyway, have one of the most dangerous offenses in the league.

Marta’s arrival in Orlando did indeed do the thing it was supposed to. The Pride’s newest signing, almost immediately and entirely unsurprisingly, became one of the NWSL’s most productive strikers. Beyond that, her presence gave the Pride a boost, and suddenly, Orlando was beginning the slow climb out of the basement.

Once Morgan arrived at the beginning of July, the two became an unstoppable force. Morgan’s had plenty of struggles during her time in the NWSL. Things in Portland went bad, and even last year, her first with the Pride, wasn’t particularly impressive. But this season, whether it was the experience of playing for OL, having Marta as a running mate, or a combination of both, Morgan’s had a pretty incredible return to form. Together, along with Harris, who returned two weeks ago after missing 11 games due to injury, Marta and Morgan have turned the Pride around. Now, Orlando’s sitting in fourth, and though the Pride’s position in the top four is hardly secure, with not a lot of time left and the team looking better than it ever has, the postseason is very, very possible.

The first step toward Orlando making that chance at a postseason berth closer to reality comes Saturday, but the Pride will have to go through Kansas City to get there, and while that may have once seemed like a relatively mundane task, it’s not now. Not with the Blues playing the way they have been lately.

When Amy Rodriguez scored early in the second half of FC Kansas City’s first game of the season to put the Blues up 2-0 over Boston, it looked like, finally, the rebuilding that started after the 2015 season was complete. And that it was A-Rod and Sydney Leroux, who’d both missed the entire 2016 season due to pregnancy, leading the way was a definite positive for FCKC. And then the Blues were dealt the big blow of A-Rod, just minutes after scoring that goal, going down injured. Eventual diagnosis: a season-ending ACL tear.

The loss of A-Rod is, in the larger league picture, hardly unique to Kansas City. Almost every team has suffered the loss of a key player this season, whether it was Harris in Orlando, Joanna Lohman in Washington, Kealia Ohai in Houston, Rose Lavelle in Boston or, most recently, Christie Pearce in New Jersey. But where some of those teams — or, mostly the Sky Blues and Orlandos of those teams — have managed to cobble together something that still looks hopeful, Kansas City sans A-Rod, pretty quickly and completely, fell apart.

Without Rodriguez, Leroux disappeared entirely for long stretches. The midfield was out of sorts. Even Kansas City’s defense, regularly one of the league’s best even when the team isn’t, looked shaky. All of that sent the Blues, very quickly, tumbling down the table. After beating Boston on opening day, Kansas City didn’t win again for a month. And sure, the Blues followed that win, 1-0 over Washington on May 22, by beating the Spirit again the following weekend, but then Full Moon Fever got stuck in the CD player it was all “Free Fallin’” on repeat.

From May 27, the day the Blues beat Washington for the second time in as many weeks, to Aug. 13, when they beat Houston 1-0, FCKC did not win a single game. Nine games and 27 possible points. FCKC earned just two, from a pair of draws in mid-June.

By the time Kansas City landed in Houston three weeks ago, the Blues had put together a string of six straight losses. It was only through the dueling disasters that are Boston and Washington that FCKC wasn’t at the bottom of the table.

But in Houston, for some reason, FCKC’s skid finally came to an end. With Orlando, there’s a very tangible thing you can point to for the Pride’s sudden turnaround. Marta arrived, the team got confident and slowly better, and then Morgan showed up. Missing pieces, found. For FCKC, nothing’s really changed from the team that was dropping games at a pace that made the 2011 Atlanta Beat look not so bad.

Kansas City didn’t sign anyone, Rodriguez didn’t pull a Jess Fishlock and have some miraculous recovery. The Blues, through all of it, just kind of stayed the course, white knuckling it though the rough part with the knowledge that eventually every storm blows over. Following the 1-0 win in Houston, Kansas City could have — and probably should have — reverted back to whatever was going on before. FCKC’s next two games were against Portland and Chicago, two of league’s top teams and two teams they’d failed to score against at all this season. Instead, the Blues returned to Kansas City and promptly knocked off the Thorns, with second-half goals from Leroux and Yael Averbuch erasing a 1-0 Portland lead.

The following week, facing a Chicago team in the middle of its own mini-meltdown, Kansas City again put together one of its best performances of the season. With goals from Leroux, Katie Bowen and Maegan Kelly, a two-assist game from Shea Groom, and five saves, including one on a PK, from Nicole Barnhart, Kansas City beat the Red Stars 3-1.

Now, heading into Saturday’s game with Orlando, the Blues are in seventh but just six points out of the top four. It’s a big hill to climb, and with not a lot of time left and both Seattle and the insanity that is Sky Blue above them on the table, there is a lot to overcome. But a win against the Pride on Saturday would also cut Orlando’s lead in half, and depending on other results, could put Kansas City just three points out of the top four.

Of course, the stakes are also high for the Pride. Orlando’s position is currently pretty precarious, with Seattle two points back and Sky Blue only trailing by three. But if the Pride can beat Kansas City, and depending on what Chicago does against Washington later on Saturday night, Orlando could leapfrog the Red Stars and land in third and with little more safety as the season heads into its final month.

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