Angel City wins big and gets help it needed to qualify for NWSL playoffs
In just two seasons, Angel City had become the richest team in U.S. women’s soccer. It has drawn the third- and fourth-highest season attendance totals in NWSL history, fielded 10 World Cup players and signed teenager Alyssa Thompson to the league’s second $1-million contract.
What it hadn’t done until Sunday was qualify for the playoffs, and it faced long odds in making that happen. Entering the final day of the regular season, it needed a win over the league’s best team and favorable results in at least two other games.
It got all three.
Angel City took care of its business, blitzing the Portland Thorns 5-1 before a sun-splashed crowd at BMO Stadium. It was the most dominant performance and most one-sided result in franchise history. When the results from the rest of Sunday came in, Angel City had jumped over Orlando, the Washington Spirit and NJ/NY Gotham to finish fifth in the 12-team league.
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The top six teams make the playoffs, which start next weekend, and Angel City needed every goal it scored to edge Gotham and Orlando on tiebreakers for the penultimate spot. It will travel to Seattle to face Megan Rapinoe and the OL Reign on Friday.
“The complete performance was really important,” interim coach Becki Tweed said. “We knew goal difference was going to matter. The team was super motivated. No one in the [locker] room wrote each other off. We were all in. We knew we weren’t done.”
Added defender Sarah Gorden: “I’ve thought about this moment since our first game, since our first day of preseason, which was like eight or nine months ago.”
Sunday’s victory capped a valiant late-season push by Angel City (8-7-7), which lost just once in 11 regular-season games under Tweed. It needed every point to get out of the deep hole it dug during a 2-6-3 start under former coach Freya Coombe, who was sacked in June.
Even so, it entered Sunday with little having been settled; depending on the results, Angel City could have ended the season anywhere from third to 11th in the tight NWSL table.
“The last 12 games or so for us have been must-win games because of where we were just a few months ago, and how we were kind of on a losing streak,” Gorden said. “So coming into this game, we already knew the mentality we had to put on and what we had to do to perform.”
After a slow start, Angel City came alive late in the first half, getting goals from M.A. Vignola and Scarlett Camberos just minutes after referee Elvis Osmanovic paused the game for a hydration break. Vignola’s came on a left-footed shot from a tough angle on the left edge of the penalty area in the 36th minute; Camberos doubled the advantage two minutes later, nodding home a Claire Emslie cross at the far post.
Those two goals, combined with other results from around the league, sent Angel City into halftime fifth in the standings. It was the first time Angel City had been in playoff position since early May.
But the day was only half over, so Angel City opened the second half with one eye on its own game and the other eye on the out-of-town scoreboard, although Gorden said the players on the field were in the dark about what was happening elsewhere.
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“We had no idea,” she said. “We’re just trying to win and score as many goals as we can. We know that there were a lot of people close on points. We knew that goal differential was important. The goal was just to focus on ourselves, go out and do what we could do to score as many goals.”
Savannah McCaskill gave the team a bit more of a cushion, extending the lead two minutes after the intermission by tapping in a Vignola pass from the edge of the six-yard box. It was her fourth goal of the season, tying Thompson for the team lead. When Sydney Leroux added a goal five minutes later, the rout was on.
Portland’s Hina Sugita and Angel City’s Jun Endo, World Cup teammates for Japan earlier this summer, exchanged late goals less than a minute apart to account for the final score. But Angel City couldn’t relax until the other results came in, results that showed Washington losing and Gotham playing to a draw.
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With a win, Orlando also matched Angel City and Gotham with 31 points, but the five goals Sunday, a franchise record, gave Angel City fifth place on a pair of tiebreakers. The four-goal margin of victory also marked just the second time in two years the team had won by multiple scores.
For Portland (10-7-5), Sunday’s loss not only left it winless in its last six road games in all competitions, but it also cost the Thorns the NWSL Shield, which goes to the team with the league’s best regular-season record. The San Diego Wave (11-7-4) took that prize with 2-0 win over Racing Louisville.
“The goal was to get in and not just get in,” said Tweed, who came to her news conference wearing a soaking gray Angel City T-shirt following the team’s postgame celebration. “There’s still so much more from this group, and we’re peaking at the right time. That’s really important. We’re obviously going to push to continue to go forward.”
