Providence Park lived up to the hype for 2018 NWSL championship match

Year six has come and gone for the NWSL. Once again, there have been ups and downs, but the final in Portland showed just how far this league has come.

The NWSL championship match may not have lived up to the hype on the pitch, but the event itself was arguably the best in league history, with Providence Park proving the perfect venue as the Courage beat the Thorns 3-0. As another season comes to a close, we take a look back at championship weekend, and at what’s to come for the NWSL in 2019.

The game

This year’s NWSL final was a rematch of the 2017 championship game, in which the Portland Thorns beat the North Carolina Courage 1-0. This year, on Portland’s home field, the roles were reversed. The Courage dominated from start to finish.

Jess McDonald was named MVP following her three-goal performance, but it was hard to find anyone on the Courage who had a bad match. Debinha dominated midfield, outperforming  Lindsey Horan on both sides of the ball, North Carolina’s back line once again proved it’s the best ever in U.S. women’s pro soccer and goalkeeper Katelyn Rowland looked unfazed by the few chances Portland were able to muster.

At the end of the day, it really was no surprise North Carolina put in the performance they did. They ran over the league this season, smashing record upon record as they went. Given they scored the most goals and allowed the fewest in the history of U.S. women’s professional soccer during the regular season, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise they scored three goals and kept a shutout in the championship game.

North Carolina coach Paul Riley and his staff deserve a lot of credit. They labeled themselves underdogs, but they never really were. No team with their regular-season record could be considered underdogs, as they showed over the course of the match, about as convincing a win as you’re ever likely to see in a championship game.

The atmosphere

The NWSL’s decision to play its championship match at a predetermined venue seems like a no-brainer now. It takes time, and a lot of planning, to create the most exciting possible atmosphere for a game like this. This year, the fans, media, league and host city got that time, and the bar has been raised for the NWSL’s showpiece event.

When it was announced Portland would be hosting, few doubted the atmosphere would be anything short of electric. Then the semifinals came and went, and the Thorns found themselves in the final. All week, it was rumored the stadium would be sold out, and when Saturday rolled around, the lines outside Providence Park were long, as excitement heightened.

In the north end of the stadium, the Rose City Riveters were out in full force to try to push their team over the edge. From the very beginning, they were chanting and waving their flags. Because North Carolina were considered the home team for the match, they warmed up in front of the Riveters, who responded by waving their LGBTQ pride flags with their backs turned.

Prior to kickoff, they raised their final tifo of the season, a two-part piece inscribed with the words, “Where there’s fire, there’s smoke.” As the players walked out onto the field, the stadium rang out with chants of “P-T-F-C.” The chants and flag waving continued throughout the game, every minute as loud as the last.

https://twitter.com/ThornsFC/status/1043604799541850112

In total, 21,144 fans packed into Providence Park, a record for a women’s professional soccer championship match in the U.S. It narrowly beat out the 2001 WUSA Championship. For many in attendance at Providence Park on Saturday afternoon, the atmosphere will make this one of those moments that they will always remember.

Even outside the stadium, people were ready for the game. The airport was littered with “Go Thorns” signs, while fans — jerseys on, scarves in hand — lined the streets on Saturday morning. The atmosphere felt worthy of a championship game, the sort of environment this league and these players deserve.

The future

The NWSL will begin its seventh season in 2019. With it will come new excitement, but also new challenges, the biggest of which is the World Cup, which will present logistical problems for teams, who will lose many of their best players in the middle of the season, and the league, which has a serious scheduling headache to confront.

Currently NWSL rosters are capped at 20 players. When national team players leave for international duty, they can be replaced with what are called National Team Replacement players. These players, however, can be hard to find because they’re only paid during the time the national team players are gone.

If they want to stay with the team all season, to improve their chances of getting picked, they won’t get paid. With so little incentive to stick around, many of these players are lost to leagues in Europe. If national teams plan to have pre-World Cup camps, as most surely will, the NWSL needs to increase its roster sizes. Which brings us to the next problem: the schedule.

The NWSL has always waited until very late to announce its schedule. This past season, they pushed up the start of the season so that it would leave time between the championship game and the start of World Cup qualifying. In the 2015, the year of the last World Cup, the NWSL schedule was reduced to 20 games, play was extended into September and a two-week break was added during the World Cup group stage.

But 2015 was a long time ago, when the league was still in its infancy. It’s hard to see the NWSL going back down to a 20-game season, and it may need to extend play into October as a result. The most important part, however, will be the break. The best thing that the league can do is take at least a two-week break during the group stage of the tournament.

Outside of the World Cup, the most pressing issue facing the league is the lack of a commissioner. Jeff Plush resigned in March of 2017, and he still hasn’t been replaced. Managing director Amanda Duffy has handled most of his duties, but it seems unlikely she wants the job, given she hasn’t even been named interim commissioner. The NWSL has to make filling the role of commissioner a priority. No professional sports league can possibly survive and grow without a leader at the top to help make the big decisions, and there are plenty of big decisions to make.

For example, the 2018 Sky Blue team went through hell and back throughout the year. Their training conditions were poor, they had very little assistance from the front office staff, on issues as important as wages and reimbursements and they often had the worst travel experiences of any team in the league.

Then there were the weather-related incidents in 2018. Many teams had to play in the haze and smoke of wildfires on the west coast, with nothing more than a few water breaks and oxygen masks on the sideline. Other teams were forced to play late at night or the next morning because severe weather derailed the originally-scheduled matches.

That’s not even to mention Hurricane Florence, which forced the Courage, who had earned the No. 1 seed and home field advantage, to play their playoff semifinal match in Portland, on Tuesday instead of Sunday, giving them three days fewer rest than their opponents in the final. The league obviously can’t control the weather, but it can be more prepared for when things go wrong.

And we shouldn’t forget the refereeing either. All sports complain about referees, but NWSL fans have far better reason than most. It’s hard for a women’s professional league to be taken seriously when most of its refs are coming from second division men’s leagues. Play has suffered as a result — for example, only two red cards were given out all of last season. If the league is serious about protecting its players, a good step is to make sure the refs are up to the standard of one of the elite women’s leagues in the world.

2018 was a record-breaking year for the NWSL. It’s time for the league to get even better in 2019.