Racing 0 Spirit 2 post match thoughts

Racing won a few key stat battles, but lost the match last night. The stat victories are a small sign of progress, with a slight caveat, so let's start with the positives.

Racing won the possession battle 57% to 43%, their most lopsided possession advantage ever by a wide margin. Of course when you concede a goal early, sometimes the other team is perfectly willing to sit back and absorb pressure. Racing has fallen behind early before and gone on to lose the possession battle by a wide margin, so I think the possession advantage, especially in the first half, was a good sign.

Racing also had a best ever shot total with 17. The Spirit had 18 shots as well and I thought the game was pretty open, especially in the 2nd half. Louisville also had there best ever passing accuracy for a match (79.8%) and a half (83.5% in the first half).

Let's talk about accuracy. I’m not enough of a soccer stat nerd to know if the pass that Nealy Martin attempted to Freja Olofsson in the fifth minute counted as an accurate pass or not. Accurate statistically or not, the loss of possession led to the first Spirit goal. Freja definitely got a touch on the ball from Nealy, but she had to stretch to get her right foot on the ball and the pass made it impossible for Freja to get a second touch to steady her possession. There was nothing wrong with the idea of the pass. If it had been delivered slightly more accurately, Olofsson could have delivered a one touch pass to Fox to start an attack. To be completely fair, Olofsson was calling for the ball in space. It's one of those slightly misplaced passes that if it leads nothing, is completely forgotten in a matter of minutes. However, passes in your own half have to be of pinpoint accuracy. I have made enough terrible passes out of the back that led to goals during pickup games, that I am an expert on this. In fact, my friend Juma scored on me this past weekend. I feel your pain Nealy!

The second goal came from a secondary header on a corner. Bonner could not quite deflect the initial header out of harm’s way and Staab finished off the effort. It wasn't the best game for the Martin/Bonner pairing.

Racing have played 10 games now, and in my opinion are a playoff long shot at this point. Some early luck probably raised my hopes a bit. They are by no means out of the race, but now have very little margin for error. If they can win their next 2 matches, I will be willing to reevaluate, but as this league has shown every point is earned via hard work.

It's a bit early to start thinking about next year, but I have started making a mental list of areas that need to be addressed during the next offseason. I won't go into all of them here, but I did want to mention a couple.

First I think the team need a few more physical defenders. The old adage in basketball goes that you can't teach height. Racing could use at least one more towering presence in the box both on defense and attack. This leads to my second point. Bekki Morgan, who sometimes I swear I share a brain with, pointed out on Twitter that this team doesn't look threatening at all from corners. I went back and reviewed the goals just to double check, but Racing has never scored from a corner. They have scored from a couple of set pieces, but that is rare too. Maybe short corners are the temporary answer but who knows.

Overall the first half was very encouraging, but a rather pedestrian 2nd half tempered the progress a bit. At least we don't have to wait 2 weeks for the next macth.