Saturday evening the Thorns went to San Francisco and dropped a 1-nil clanger to Bay FC.
I taped the match, but…
I’ve got contract work out of town starting Monday, which means today is a travel day, which means I’m going to be unable to post the match report in a timely enough fashion to make it worthwhile.
I apologize.
That said, I thought I summed up this dog pretty thoroughly over at Stumptown:
Embarrassing Stats Report:
Shots: Bay FC 10, Portland 16
SOG: Bay FC 2, Portland 5
xG: Bay FC 0.9, Portland 1.1
Post-shot xG: Bay FC 0.43, Portland 0.92
Goals: Bay FC 1, Portland 0
This is what Ken means when he goes on about how his squad is “the better team”. In terms of “doing soccer-y things”? Yes. The Thorns generated more, and better chances. They “should” have run off with at least a point, either from holding on to a scoreless draw or from bagging the equalizer.
But as we all saw, the problems were the same problems we’ve seen from KenBall all season; at one end turnovers and individual errors in the backline, in the middle incoherence and an inability to play through a midblock, in front of goal failure to finish (when the buildup was there) or lack of connectivity that broke down the buildup with a mishit pass or tackle-for-loss before the shot.
I keep coming back to “WTF do you do in practice, Ken?” Because on the matchday field it looks like eleven people who just met. The understanding seems frail, the sense of skills-to-roles distant.
If it was obviously a problem of individual ability it would be on the player or players.
When it’s across the squad? It’s – as we also all saw – it’s on the boss.
But – and here’s what bugs me – I can see this squad sort of bumbling along to a 6th place finish. There’s still a lot of individual ability here. And I think that’ll be enough to save Ken’s hide.
This match didn’t tell Agoos anything he didn’t know. If he didn’t hand Ken his head before, I don’t see this changing that. We’re on 1.45pts/game almost halfway through the season, and the red line is 1.36pts/game right now. That’s a playoff finish, and then all Ken has to do is win three games straight. He hasn’t done that since the tenth game of 2024, mind, but…
One last interesting stat; right now we’re GD+4 (16GF, 12GA). If you remove three of our eleven matches (Gotham and Racing here, Houston away) we’re GD-2 (5GF, 7GA). Our attack looks better than it is because of three outburst games; without them it’s 0.62G/gm.
The team with the lowest GF in the league (Chicago, 8 in 11 games) is 0.72G/gm.
Longtime soccer savant who goes by “ag167” expanded on this:
“I mean the other thing is when the xG is that close it’s a marginal game and sometimes you lose. You definitely don’t deserve to win, as he keeps saying. The other point too: after going 1-0 down, the Thorns had 7 shots, worth .48 xG. Bay also had 7 shots, worth .65 xG.”
To which I replied:
“Yeah, that’s kind of the irritating thing; for all that the Thorns kind of “did more stuff” the actual threat they created from all that random running and passing wasn’t significantly more dangerous than BFC did (and Bay is a “sorta-meh-midtable” club right now with Oshoala and Kundananji misfiring…). So, no; his plan such as it was put his club in a position where a minor collision of defensive errors+lack of finishing+bad luck = “tough loss”.
Given that the best he “deserved” would have been the draw, and it’s irking to hear Ken go on about how he doesn’t “deserve” these results. He’s getting pretty much what he’s doing…”
So…yeah. Kind of “SSDD”. I promise to review tape when I get back to pull out the tactical trivia like pressing, turnovers, corners (and this one was a grotesque outlier of “got a shit-ton of corners, got nothing out of them” corner kick issue we’ve had with Ken) and some rough PMRs.
I hope we can reconvene after the Washington match here next weekend.
Until then, onward, Rose City!
- Thorns FC: On Hiatus - June 8, 2025
- Tequila Sunset - May 22, 2025
- Thorns FC: Houston Wild Wings - May 20, 2025
