Pride 2 Racing 2 Post Match Thoughts
Courtesy USA Sports Images
I am a big fan of Occam’s Razor when it comes to explaining why things are the way they are. For the uninitiated, Occam’s Razor is a mental model (how we understand the world). It has a really technical definition that I won’t get into here, but feel free to explore if you like. In its most basic terms, it translates to “among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” In even more basic terms: the simplest explanation is preferable to the one that is more complex. In a world filled with needless conspiracy theories, it is how I keep my sanity. If you have even heard young physicians being taught “if it looks like a horse and sounds like a horse, it’s probably a horse, not a zebra” when diagnosing patients then you are familiar with the principle. Applying it to a Racing example, my answer to “Why was Ebony Salmon traded” is “she wasn’t getting any minutes on the pitch.” One could make all kinds of other hypotheses, but that one is the one we know to be true and doesn’t assume anything else. Again, that isn’t to say you couldn’t come up with another hypothesis, but you would be hard pressed to prove it. I like proof.
Bringing this into more focus on this match and where Racing stands at this point in the season, the burning question to me is “Why can’t Racing hold a lead?”
Racing has been so uniquely poor when scoring first that I had to change the bottom end of the scale on this graph. Here are a few of facts:
Racing is averaging approximately .75 fewer points than the league average when scoring first.
Racing is also the worst team in the league when you factor in how many points they have won with a two goal lead after scoring first (1.33). Seven teams have perfect records when leading by at least two goals and only Racing and Washington are below 2.
Racing is the only team to not always get at least a point when having a 2 goal lead.
I have a couple of hypothesis as to why Racing can’t protect a lead.
Hypothesis #1: The NWSL is too chaotic and no lead is safe.
That is the branding that the NWSL seems to embrace most of the time. In fact, while the matches do seem to go back and forth, the overwhelming majority of matches are won by the team scoring first and 78% of two goal leads are converted into 3 points by the team that scores first. This hypothesis can be easily rejected.
Hypothesis #2: Racing’s culture doesn’t value the bird in the hand.
This is the one that makes me the most infuriated. While I will ultimately find a simpler working hypothesis, I think there are some things to mull over here. We have seen Racing do a few things that makes this hypothesis not so easily dismissible. I present this evidence:
Racing has spent the last month giving a preference to what they might one day get, vs. valuing what they currently have. They traded away their all-time leading goal scorer and a solid defender to get picks and cash. They bizarrely let Erin Simon go, knowing that she was a solid back-up defender, exactly what they would need during a time of missing international players. They traded Ebony Salmon, who was not perfect but had proven plenty in order to get more allocation money. Each one of these moves made the status quo worse in my opinion. You can’t always be looking to the future by neglecting your present. One of the last memories I have of my grandfather was him telling me that he wished he had taken my grandmother out to dinner a few more times when she was alive. It was the biggest regret he had in his life. He always saved for a rainy day, worrying about the future, so that he sometimes forgot to live in the moment. Wishing away time is a folly of the young. Racing wants its fans to be patient and trust that better things are coming. I get the need and desire to plan for a better future, but you also need to exist and live and protect the current moment. I also wonder if this philosophy translates on the pitch. You have a range of tactics when you have a lead in a match. On one end of the scale, there is “protect the lead” and on the other end is there is “build on the lead.” Racing chose last night to build on the lead and that tactic worked until it didn’t. This is purely a gut feeling, and why I will ultimately not fully embrace this hypothesis, but Racing (to me) doesn’t seem to be a team that values a lead. It always wants a bigger one. In fact, that actually may be they only way they can win, but it definitely seems to me to be the only way they try to win. This leads me to:
Hypothesis #3: Racing isn’t a good enough team defensively to protect a lead.
And maybe not good enough overall for us to expect anything more than what we are currently getting. If Racing were a good team, they would have put away a frankly pretty poor Orlando team last night. They couldn’t, so the simplest answer is that they themselves aren’t a good team yet. Enough of the season has passed for me to think that while this team has shown flashes of competence and even brilliance, it is still a year and a draft and a free agency season away from being playoff ready. For me, this hypothesis fits Occam’s Razor and is my operating assumption (for now). I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, because Racing scored a couple of excellent goals. DeMelo is clearly this team’s best attacking player. More than once she showed the determination to take on the game herself. I will be optimistic on this one and say it was determination and not frustration, but her teammates could stand to step up a bit to make sure that her determination doesn’t morph into its negative cousin.
The offside and penalty calls were debatable, but should be irrelevant when you have 2 goal lead in the second half, so I don’t want to waste any more energy thinking about those. Racing clearly missed Fox the most last night. I’m not sure she changes the outcome, but her absence was the most glaring. I will go back to reference hypothesis number 2 in that I don’t understand the wisdom of signing defensive cover that is going to be unavailable when you need it most in the short term. It’s like Racing isn’t taking this current season seriously. I am sure the club still believes it has made the correct long-term decisions, but it would have been nice to have a few more defensive (or any) options on the bench last night.
