ACFC 0-1 Houston Dash

I don’t know about anyone else, but I had a bad feeling about this match. There was every reason to believe that this could, or should, have been the most dominant match of the season. Houston played Gotham on Wednesday, before traveling out to LA, while we had over a week to prepare. They had only won one previous games, six games ago, and when they won it, they still had María Sánchez. She led Houston in Shot Creating Actions that day, but she asked for a trade just before the deadline, and consequently went to San Diego for a huge amount of money. In the NWSL, Houston is last in xG, last in xGA, last in Shots, last in Shots on Target, last in Shot Creating Actions, and first in Shots on Target Against. They entered the game second to last in the table. By any metric, they’re not a great team. They traded away their star player and the cornerstone of the franchise, they’ve had six different head coaches since 2022 (including interims), and they had very little rest. I don’t understand how a team in those circumstances can come to our stadium and win.

I tend to emphasize performance over results, and if we’d played better I could actually accept the loss. Earlier this season, Houston had a 1-1 draw with Kansas City, but in that match, KC had 29 shots, with 13 on target, leading to Jane Campbell tying an NWL record with 12 saves. If Angel City had done something similar, I could say that’s fine, it’s just a fluke. But what actually happened is that we took 13 Shots, with only 2 on target. Only one of those shots had an xG above .15. Houston actually had better total xG: 1.1 to 0.9 for ACFC. They had more touches in the attacking third: 173 to 125. They had more corners, with that fateful final one being the difference maker. And because I don’t have access to physical performance stats, I can’t say for sure, but it definitely looked like Houston had more energy. We should have dominated this game, and won comfortably, but instead, we lost on a heartbreaker, and of course, it was Paige Nielsen who delivered the coup de grâce. I think that I like statistics, because I want to believe that there is an underlying order to things, and that the worst won’t always happen the way my pessimistic side says it will. But then, something like this happens, and my pessimism says, “See? I told you so.”

Moments That Didn’t Make It Onto the Scoresheet

I don’t want to spend much time on the goal. It was another poorly defended set piece. It really did feel like karma. But I think that there were opportunities in the previous 96 minutes to have changed the course of this game, and most of them come down to decision making. We’ll look at three of them here.

67’ Angel City - Off a Houston throw-in, Angel City wins the ball back in their own defensive third, and the entire team is back to defend. Curry lobs a ball up to Le Bihan, who is just about the highest player up the pitch. She controls it on her chest, and then flicks the ball around the corner to Alyssa Thompson in full stride, coming up the left sideline, just about entering the middle third. Thompson carries the ball all the way up the field, eventually coming across to the center channel. As she reaches the top of Houston’s box, it’s a 3 v 3, with Thompson right at the center with the three Houston defenders in front of her, and Emslie near the right corner of the box, and Leroux coming up on the left. At this point, Thompson can make either pass, and it’s probably going to result in a quality chance. The defenders momentum is going back towards the net, and none of them are in a good position to make a challenge. Instead, Thompson comes to a complete stop, allows the defenders to regroup, and forces Emslie and Leroux to stop as well, so they don’t go offside. Finally, she makes the sideways pass to Emslie, who has to wait for the ball to arrive. By the time it does, a Houston defender is across to challenge Emslie, and new defenders are arriving by the second. Emslie buys herself half a yard and gets a left footed shot that gets past her initial defender, but it’s blocked by one of the other Houston players that arrived late. I think this was a really high quality chance, with all of Angel City’s front three making good, intelligent runs, but that final pass just didn’t happen at the right moment. You can get a lot of things right, but it can only take one decision to derail an otherwise promising attack.

80’ Angel City- This attack was a built from the back, starting with Haračić sending the ball wide left to Mathias. It’s worth noting here, that she seemed frustrated by a lack of options, but made the pass. Mathias controls it, but is immediately under pressure. Hammond provides an option, and Mathias does well to find her in the middle of the pitch. Hammond makes a great heads-up play to find Katie Johnson, basically right in the middle of the center circle. Johnson shows great hold up play here, collecting the ball with her back to goal, and then turning and finding Spencer in space on the right. It’s a perfect leading pass, so Spencer doesn’t have to slow down at all. She carries the ball into the box, and takes a shot, which Campbell collects. However, when she takes that shot, Johnson and Le Bihan are both arriving at the top of the box, while Houston’s entire back four is collapsing. So often I see Angel City go for the cross or the shot, when there’s a cutback available, and I personally feel like the cutback is always the better choice. In this case, Spencer’s shot was only worth .04 xG, with a Post Shot xG of .04 also. No surprise that Campbell saves it.

This sequence also presents the conundrum of personnel and tactical identity. What I take from a lot of interviews is that Angel City wants to be less transitional, and be able to build up from the back, more like this attack. Johnson and Bright both seem better suited to this, as I think that they’re better playing with their back to goal, as Johnson does on this play, while Leroux is better running at goal, as in the first sequence I described. But Leroux is the first choice striker right now. This just feels like another case of the club simultaneously trying to go in two different directions, but I think that we do need to align the tactics with our players strengths. Maybe that means changing players, and maybe that means changing tactics.

81’ Houston - Directly after the previous sequence, Houston gets probably the best chance of the game. Whether this was tactical or not, I don’t know, but Spencer is playing higher on the right, and Alyssa Thompson is behind her. Courtney Peterson gets the ball on Houston’s left, and puts a ball over the top that completely cuts out Angel City’s entire team. Like literally, all ten outfield players. Alozie times her run pretty well, and is pretty close to level with Gorden, but maybe just a little bit past her. There’s no question of offside, though, because Mathias is playing her on, which I think is a mistake. The full backs can see across the whole back four, so it should be the centerbacks that are the deepest, while the fullbacks can adjust to them. It’s also not often, that we see an opposing player get in behind Gorden, but that’s what happens here. Alozie is through on goal, with Gorden trailing and in no position to challenge, even to take a tactical foul. Alozie shoots, and Haračić makes a great stop. Alozie has a good chance here (the xG on her shot was .25), but had she just rolled the ball across to Andressa, that would have been an easy tap in. Angel City was lucky Alozie made the wrong choice here. This sequence also illustrates how I felt about energy at the end of the game. Yes, Alozie and Andressa came off the bench, but Houston’s whole team was running when that long ball was teed up. Angel City looked tired, and more like the team that played midweek and then traveled, rather than Houston. Mathias also was a sub, yet Andressa gets ahead of her, despite starting deeper. I can’t explain it, but I definitely think that it’s true that Houston had more to give at the end of the game, and it’s part of why the eventual goal didn’t surprise me.

Clarisse Le Bihan

One of the bright spots for me in this match was Le Bihan getting her first start. She was a statistical phenom last year, making my list for a Protected IX ahead of the expansion draft. Despite only 7 starts and 681 minutes last year, she was still tied for 7th in the league in assists, 2nd in Shot Creating Actions per 90 between Sofia Smith and Megan Rapinoe, and led the league in Assists per 90, xA per 90, and xAG per 90. With her first start, and 90 full minutes, she was back at it with 3 Key Passes, tied with Emslie for the team lead, 6 Shot Creating Actions (also leading the team), plus 2 Shots of her own, 2 Tackles + 1 Interception, and a Yellow Card for good measure for preventing a Houston free kick. Just to highlight her 6 Shot Creating Actions, that means that she played a direct role in over half of the total shots that Angel City generated (7 of 13, one of her SCAs was on a Shot she took herself). The offense clearly wasn’t gelling yet, as evidenced by only .9 xG on those 13 shots, but I think that this is a building block. I expected Le Bihan to have a much bigger role this year, especially when McCaskill left, but for some reason, it’s actually gone down. It was good to see her step right back into being her usual shot-producing-self when she did get the start. I’m hoping we get to see her playing more moving forward, and I’d be intrigued to see what she looks like playing alongside Fuller, with Rodríguez in a more holding role, acknowledging that this formation would be a more high risk/ high reward one.

Becki Tweed

Tweeds comments in the press conference after the match, as well as at the at the season ticket event last weekend, are all, broadly speaking, things that I agree with. At the event she talked about a goal for the season being to grow the culture and identity of the team. Absolutely, I’m on board with that. In her press conference, she talked about how you can’t work on the final third until the first two thirds are figured out. Again, I agree with that. You can’t have a final third strategy if you can’t get the ball into the final third. Also, I think that she’s right that Angel City did look better progressing out of the first two thirds. Rocky Rodríguez was Angel City’s leading passer against Houston, the first time all season that someone other than a defender or goalkeeper has led this category. That says to me that they were successful breaking Houston’s first line, whereas in the previous games, there has been a lot more passing around the back four, and back to the keeper. The next step is breaking the back line, and honestly, I do trust the process, and I think that we’ll get there. Unequivocally, I think that Becki Tweed is the right coach for Angel City right now.

My problem with everything she said is in the timeline. Going back to just before Tweed took over the job, in 2023, we lost to Chicago on June 5th. We only had two wins in those first nine games, but Chicago was in even worse shape. They were last in the league, they’d lost six of their first nine games, and they’d only scored one goal in their previous three games. Just like the Houston game, I thought, “Playing the last place team at home sounds like the perfect chance to turn things around.” So of course, Chicago beat us. It was clear at that point that Freya Coombe was under pressure, so I remember walking away from that game thinking, that’s it. But actually that wasn’t it. Coombe was in charge for one more game before she was replaced. In that moment, I assumed that that extra week was because the front office was getting a replacement lined up first. But instead, it was announced that Assistant Becki Tweed was being promoted in Interim Head Coach. Okay, I thought, maybe they’re waiting until after the World Cup, because they want to take a swing at a really big name manager. Tweed, of course, turned the team around, only losing one time in fourteen matches in all competitions before the playoffs.

I’m revisiting this past for a couple reasons. One, I think that the front office got lucky here. Tweed was not picked as part of an exhaustive interview process, looking at multiple candidates. She was an emergency replacement, when it looked like there wasn’t a succession plan in place, and she turned out to be more than capable of handling the job. To me, it’s kind of the hiring equivalent of scoring a goal off a .05 xG shot. It’s also worth remembering that her first top managerial job in the NWSL was to take over a team in disarray. She’s had an uphill battle. Third, at some point during that eleven game unbeaten streak, it became clear that a new coach wasn’t going to be hired. I also think that it would not have been fair for a playoff spot to have been a prerequisite for her getting the job full time, considering the hole we had to climb out. So why wasn’t she given the job sooner? An interim head coach is just not able to make the systemic changes that were needed, and that she’s trying to make now. Could some of this work have been accomplished earlier if she was officially given the job last year?

The other thing that’s just weird to me is what was happening during preseason? It seems like there was a style they were going for that involved building out of the back at all costs. Henry, Nielsen, and Anderson all seemed like integral pieces of that system through the first three games. And then Anderson gets dropped, and Henry and Nielsen are traded away. It really feels to me like the process that Tweed has been talking about only really started at this point. As I said in my article about the trades, it would all have made more sense to me if they’d happened in the offseason, and then that time in training could have been spent on the work that’s happening now. And I would say that from the point of the trades onward, I have seen some progress, just not for a full 90 minuts, and not over the entire pitch. But it all boils down to my feeling that there have been multiple changes of direction, or just not having a direction and waiting to see what might happen. I think that we might finally have a direction, but it’s about ten months too late, and coupled with our recruitment, other teams are pulling away from us. I think it’s going to be key, at a minimum, that the club doesn’t change direction again. Yes, it is a process, and these things take time, but we’re in year three, and I feel like too much time has been wasted already.