Really looking looking forward to your review of the Wednesday game. Will you bring us back to earth with a searing (some may say sourpuss) analysis? Or did the dazzling display of our GOAT captain warm those cockles? 😄 Also would like to hear what you think about Rocky. Sounds like Parsons has courted her for years and we gave up Purse AND a good draft pick for her. Is she all that and a bag of chips? Finally, why aren’t we starting our rookies? Nursing them back from injury still? Seems to me they should be getting as many minutes as possible.

Hmmm. Okay, coupla thoughts;

Hubly v ‘Brunn passing; Opta shows Hubly with 46 of 53 complete (86.8%), Brunn with 10 of 12 (83%). Don’t see a big advantage for Brunn there. Neither one is shown with a “key pass” (Horan, OTOH, had four…). Brunn is a great player, but I’m not sure she’s shown us anything that really makes me say “Gee, I want her on the pitch rather then Hubly”. For one thing, Utah had their best chance of the match five minutes AFTER Brunn came on, after Hubly helped keep the shoulders pinned to the mat the whole first half…

Horan: four “key passes”, so yes. Mind you, Kling had six in this match, so…

Charley: She’s been doing this for a while, and has struggled to get anything out of it other than midsummer last season. If this means she’s finding her mojo? I’m thrilled with that.

Kyle: Yeah, I liked her, too.

Slipsticks: I think the real explosion comes in the 20th Century, though; by the Teens and Twenties the slide rule is kind of the symbol of the engineer, so my guess is that the term came into vogue some time in the first twenty or thirty years of the last century…

Vero: Sadly, I think she’s pretty frustrated with the chaos around her. She was clearly PISSED Sunday. I saw way too much of that here in 2015. I’m sorry to see it again…

Random comments:
* Hubly did an admirable job on defense, and kudos to her for that. The passing improved when Sauerbrunn came on, however, and it seemed like the defending grew less desperate (despite Utah’s *increase* in desperation).

* “Simone Charley created a nice goal all on her own.”
Can we take a moment to appreciate the quality of Horan’s balls over the top? Not only does she put them on a dime, she does so with backspin. This (a) makes the ball drop sooner after it has gone over the defenders, making it harder for the goalkeeper to reach, and (b) makes the ball not skid forward after landing, also keeping it out of the goalkeeper’s clutches and potentially making it easier to control. [BTW, Valeri does this too.] Horan, with her immense ball control quality, does this kind of long ball at least as well as anyone else in the league, and possibly better.

* Charley also dealt with the pass perfectly, first using her body to shield away her defender, then doing the Messi-like moves, including the pass-the-ball-into-the-goal, to score. Nice work.

* I like Kaylyn Kyle as an announcer, despite her odd love for Angela Salem’s play, SO much more than Aly Wagner it’s not even close. I no longer feel the occasional need to turn the sound off.

* The term “slide rule pass” might be only as old as the pass. Slide rules are probably older, having been invented in the early 1600s (around when Napier discovered logarithms), while soccer, despite deep roots, dates from only the late 1800s.

* Vero is a unicorn out there. She’s so much better than her teammates that you can’t miss her. I’m glad she’s won some major trophies (UCL, various leagues) in her day.

I think she did, too. If you blow up the first screencap in the sequence you can see a little white dot next to the side-stripe of the 18-yard box; I think that’s her boot.

To give credit where it’s due, I think the term “slide rule pass” is as old as, well, the slide rule.

I honestly don’t know about this team. I WANT to think that all the pieces are there, and all it’ll take is some tinkering and time and everything will suddenly be working like a mechanical ass-kicker.

I worry that it won’t, and right now we just don’t have opposition that’s good enough to really smoke-test us to know which is which.

I feel like a real curmudgeon because I’m not sunnier about a three-goal win. A LOT of that is having to watch it again; the first time it was all like: “Hey! Nice! We got three goals!” The second time it was: “Jesus there’s a LOT of shit passing in this game. Can anyone actually get a shot on goal? C’mon, do SOMEthing…”

I’d certainly LIKE to think that the Thorns will look better than that with more practice and more minutes. I sure hope so.