Louisville v Washington Preview
The team practiced at Lynn Family stadium on Thursday morning, and while most of the media focus for the day was on the newly hired GM Ryan Dell, the players prepared for a crucial match against the Washington Spirit. Although the team is coming off of an uneven but ultimately pretty satisfactory performance in my opinion against Houston, Louisville looked like a much-improved team over the previous two iterations. It is now critical that the performances start bringing in 3 points.
I believe that Louisville is still missing a few critical pieces that will eventually be in the Starting XI. There was mostly good news on that front on Thursday. Thembi Kgatlana was a participant in practice, at least for the drills but did avoid any potential contact as she sat out the scrimmage portion of the practice. The same went for Jae Howell, who at last week’s open media practice was held out of all drills. Howell I’m told is scheduled for an additional fitness test prior to the match on Saturday, so she still has a chance to play. I expected her to still be listed as questionable on the availability report, with Kgatlana still listed as out.
As for the players who will surely be playing, Coach Björkegren singled out Savanna DeMelo as a player who looked better after reviewing last week’s game film. I am not really surprised by this as last year everybody got so used to her being the major engine in driving the team forward, that the match in Houston could have been seen as a letdown. On the contrary, I thought her (and let’s be really frank here) greatly improved teammates made her job much easier in the opener. She still got fouled more than was called, which is an increasingly troublesome trend. On the most recent episode of BTRD, Tom lamented that Pickett’s addition to the team meant that Sav wasn’t taking as many free kicks. I want to reserve judgement on that as I don’t recall any particular free kicks that Carson took being particularly set up for a DeMelo shot on goal. Pickett was really good last Sunday and hopefully this is the match where one of those crosses or corners finds a teammate’s head or boot (or thigh or knee or anything legal really).
Washington is dangerous and coming off a win. I am convinced that they are more like the champions of 2021 and not the 11th placed-team of 2022 (how in the world did they finish behind Orlando?). Coach Björkegren said of the Spirit that he expects their attack in this match to be more varied as they were very direct against the OL Reign. We no longer get the Rodman-Fox matchup, but the Rodman-Pickett matchup is just as compelling. Last year’s matches featured Fotmob Player-of-the-Match awards for each of them in their head-to-head matchups with Rodman getting it in the 3-3 draw in Cary and Pickett getting it in the 2-3 victory for the Courage in Washington. Pickett’s award also came with an assist to Erceg, so maybe we can hope for more of the same.
