Racing Louisville played in the Challenge Cup Final and had a chance to make the Top Six but came up short of the trophy and the playoffs.
Photo Courtesy of USA Today Sport Images
Let’s call them the “Niners”.
It was the third consecutive 9th-place finish for Racing Louisville in its brief history. This version of 9th featured an all-time high in points, wins, goal difference, and frankly, disappointment.
The talent on this team seems like it should merit something better than 9th place. I have heard via reliable sources that the payroll is in the top half of the league but can’t really verify that. Regardless, the performance was low enough to insist on some changes.
Match Recaps
Racing Louisville was only able to get 5 points from its 6 most recent league matches.
That yields a points/match average of .83. It would have taken a rate of 1.5 points to get them to 31 points (which would have been enough).
There were also 2 Challenge Cup matches in this stretch, so here is a quick review of the 8 matches:
Gotham 0 – Racing 0
Best Bit: Escaping New Jersey with a point as the team was thoroughly outplayed.
Worst Bit: Holloway’s shocking 42% pass completion rate (even though she didn’t have a bad match)
Key takeaway: Racing were very fortunate and didn’t look near to scoring in the match.
Racing 2 – Thorns 1
Best Bit: Pretty much everything after conceding the opener. A 2-1 scoreline flattered the Thorns.
Worst Bit: Holloway’s terrible back pass, leading to a goal (but once again she played well after the mistake).
Key takeaway: Racing get the Thorns monkey off their backs.
Reign 0 – Racing 1
Best Bit: Individual brilliance from Davis after a mistake from the Reign.
Worst Bit: Davis’s goal was a blip in an otherwise anemic attack which foreshadowed things to come.
Key takeaway: Racing make the Reign pay for their mistake and earn a spot in the finals.
Courage 2 – Racing 0
Best Bit: Racing’s players still get a little bit of extra cash in their pockets for making the final.
Worst Bit: Long travel times from Seattle and a weather delay made a win over the Courage very unlikely.
Key takeaway: The better team won, and this competition is likely done for a while at least.
Racing 0 – Dash 1
Best Bit: It’s hard to point to anything here, so maybe when the final whistle blew, and the match was over?
Worst Bit: The cracks in this team start to show even more with their disjointed play becoming all too prevalent.
Key takeaway: This was a match that the team needed to win, and they barely showed up.
Red Stars 1 – Racing 0
Best Bit: Two shots hit the crossbar and Racing should have had a penalty. That is scraping the bottom of the barrel to show you how poor this performance was.
Worst Bit: VAR overturned a clear penalty.
Key takeaway: Racing once again didn’t play well enough to expect any points.
Racing 3 – Pride 2
Best Bit: Racing overcome a 2 goals deficit to win and makes the last match mean something.
Worst Bit: It was a match full of errors by Racing, the Pride, and the officials.
Key takeaway: Racing cling on to hopes for a playoff spot.
Wave 2 – Racing 0
Best Bit: Frank assessment of the state of the team from Erceg and Howell after the match.
Worst Bit: Racing’s playoff hopes are tossed aside quickly by a superior Wave squad, and they are never really in the match.
Key takeaway: Racing finish 9th, have a middling draft pick, and round and round we go.
What went well
Oof…not much, so bulletpoints…
- First win over Portland
- Making the Challenge Cup Final and the extra prize money that went with it
- Playing a meaningful last match
That’s about it really. Pokorny looks like a good squad player, but she made her first appearance in July. Obviously, there are some favorable full season trends, but I will cover those in a full season review on my site.
What didn’t go well
The team had 3 wins in this stretch but were clearly the better team in only 2 of them. If you get results, I think you can live with some ugly football, but the last quarter of the season was full of disjointed, disinterested efforts from Racing Louisville.
They are playing like a team that has stopped listening to its coaches. That may or may not be true, but I was around enough to see what I perceived as polite but clear disinterest in what some of the coaches were saying. I also think that the lack of trust in what was being communicated from the coaching staff translated itself to the field in the form of more individual play versus team play over the last few months.
Speaking of team play, I heard a snippet of a recent interview with Thierry Henry that stuck with me. Henry was one of the most individually gifted and talented players of his generation. They asked him about the two major coaching influences in his career, Arsene Wenger at Arsenal and Pep Guardiola at Barcelona. The things that he took from each of them that made him a better player were things that helped him understand his teammates better. He learned that he should move and make runs with respect to their strengths, not just his (Wenger) and that he should move to make the space so that the team’s system works better for him and his teammates (Guardiola).
Now, Henry is an all-time great and sometimes it is easy to dismiss his brilliance as sheer talent of which he had loads. However, you have to concede that while he had tremendous talent, he was also intelligent enough to incorporate guidance from his coaches. Their guidance not only led him to elevate his own game to dizzying heights but also allowed him to elevate his teams there as well. He said, “Arsene opened my brain, and Pep opened my eyes.”
What has this got to do with Racing? Great coaching matters, because it can get the best out of every player. When you start to doubt your coaching, you start to close yourself off and think “I’ve got this.” Well, as far as I am concerned, Racing “don’t got this” and needs someone to lead them better tactically and to grow individually. Conversely, I don’t think we will ever be able to evaluate Coach Bjõrkegren’s tenure until we see what the next coach does with this team (I am writing this on Monday, October 16th so who knows what will happen by the time is it published). It is entirely possible that Coach Björkegren maxed out this team’s capabilities, but I doubt it. There were too many times when the players seemed either unsure of what to do or unwilling to do it.
As for the players, you’ve already gotten a coach presumably fired (or more accurately not get his contract renewed), so you don’t get a free pass from me on the next one. If Racing does decide to part ways with Björkegren, then the next coach has to make the playoffs in their first season. I don’t foresee a ton of roster change in this offseason, other than the players who are out of contract. That means that the core of this roster is going to have to figure out how to play under the current staff or be willing to listen to a retooled one.
Tell Us If Our Future’s Far…
Or said less poetically, when is this team going to be good?
Racing spent the season seemingly on the precipice of something, but I couldn’t quite figure out was that something was/is. The roster is full of talent, but talent that never meshed, or was not healthy enough to contribute.
Was Racing’s best XI less than the sum of its constituent parts? One thing is for sure, and that is that the creativity and scoring from open play was intermittent at best, especially as they closed the season. There was a single shining moment of teamwork in the last few matches with Kgatlana assisting on Davis’s equalizer against the Pride, but even it was a textbook counter-attacking goal, not one built from ball control or incisive movement.
I have heard the theory from many knowledgeable people that set pieces and free kicks are where you steal goals and that those goals can make the difference in a season. However, for Racing the open play goal seemed to be the elusive type of goal and the lack of that type of goal ultimately made the season a failure. Racing hasn’t scored a goal that I classify “with sustained possession” since July 21st.
Essentially what I am trying to say by that categorization is that the goal is scored from open play by breaking down a defense. I created categories for transition goals too, broken down into strict transition and transition where the defense is partially settled. You can see the 3-year history here. The NWSL is still a transition-heavy league.
With every expansion team that is added, there is a chance that the league style can shift. Until there is evidence that it has, I think you have to assume that from open play most goals will come from either ball movement across long distances or a quick change in direction. I am unsure if Racing is set up to win in transition. They are better set up not to lose in transition with tremendous improvement on the defensive side, but I was never sure what the attacking plan was in the last quarter of the season.
The simple truth is that Racing needs goal scorers not named DeMelo. Her goals tailed off in the latter half of the season, and you shouldn’t be relying on her so much anyway. Kirsten Davis improved, but Bjõrkegren preferred Nadim to her as a starter as the season progressed. Personally, I think that was frankly down to Nadim’s limitations as a sub versus Davis’s quality as a starter. World class strikers in their prime are hard to find, and I doubt that Racing is going to stumble across one with the 6th pick in the draft, so they are going to have to figure out different ways to score.
That means some tactical changes are needed, and that usually means a coaching change. Kanu didn’t prove to be the goal scorer she was in Mexico. There is little to no chance that Nadim or McDonald is here next season. Hopefully, that frees up some forward spots and maybe they can lure a player, preferably an NWSL proven-one.
Racing GM Ryan Dell has his work cut out for him. He inherited a roster that was decent on paper, but he is going to have to become an alchemist to figure out how to get them to play better together. If the club is going to rely on Kgatlana as an attacking force, she cannot make as many lone runs forward.
At a minimum, there needs to be runners positioned to make front and back post runs with her. She often draws multiple defenders and is begging for someone to run with her. The problem is that Racing’s current forwards lack her speed. To be fair, her speed is rare. This means that she needs to have runners that make themselves available on the cut-back. Davis seems to have it figured out, so maybe that tandem can produce better results next year. I can’t count the number of times that fans lamented the lack of back post runs on set pieces.
That has to improve as well. Pickett’s crosses and corners are tailor-made for back-post runs, so you aren’t taking full advantage of her strengths at present. Milliet’s right-sided partners have been mismatched to her strengths at times too. I hope the 2024 season is the season of building better on-field connections and imploring players to understand each other’s strengths better.
