Racing Prepare for Houston
Courtesy Racing Louisville
After Racing’s open practice on Thursday, new signees Sh’Nia Gordon and Julia Lester were made available for the media along with Coach Björkegren and CeCe Kizer. Here are the items of interest from those interviews:
Sh’Nia Gordon: Sh’Nia was in preseason training with CSKA Moscow in Turkey when the FIFA decision came to allow foreign nationals to void their contracts with Russian clubs. Not being in Russia allowed her to get news about the events in the Ukraine, which if she had been in Russia may not have been readily available. Based on the recent events, she had pretty much decided that she was not going to play in Russia this year regardless of which teams reached out to her. However, Racing was the first team to reach out to her and she obviously signed for them. Coach Kim told her that her main role would be to go 1 v 1 in attack.
Julia Lester: When I asked her what she learned by working with Coach Björkegren for a season and a half, she stated that he loved to play from the back. Since she started off as an outside back prior to college and moved to center back at Florida and at Apollon under Björkegren, she had to learn to get comfortable receiving the ball from her goalkeeper and having the other team apply pressure. When asked about her preferred position, she said that she missed the attacking side of the game that you get as an outside back but had learned a lot in her time at center back. In the end she said that she was fine with either and that “defense is really fun for me.”
CeCe Kizer: When asked about Houston, she said to expect a competitive match between teams with similar styles and that their talented front line has a lot of pace (my number one concern as well). On what the team learned from the game vs KC, Kizer said that team would be looking to press and play up the field a bit higher (which was evident in practice on Thursday) and to get more numbers forward and not be strictly a counter attacking team.
Kim Björkegren: He noted that there was some expected fatigue from the first full match, but that all players were back in training except for Nadia. Kim also mentioned being prepared for the pace of the Dash’s front 3 or 4 players. On bringing Julia over from Cyprus, he said that she was a “perfect match” for his team and the style that he wants to play. She moved over as soon as the title was secured (Apollon have one match remaining in the season). On CeCe, Kim called her “one of the best players in the league.” On Sh’Nia, he mentioned her pace and effectiveness in transition as being major assets.
It’s pretty much an open secret that Racing will be bringing in a couple more international players. After seeing that Lester was allowed to move over early from Apollon, I checked the current English WSL standings to see if anything was close to being settled (assuming that the English league is the most likely place to find talent willing to move to the NWSL). Unfortunately for Racing, every team still has something to play for whether it be the championship, a Champion’s League place or relegation. Teams have played either 16 or 17 out of the 22 scheduled fixtures. The battle for the top 3 will likely come down to 5 teams and it’s also likely to go down to the last matchday which is on May 8th. In short, don’t expect any more moves until then unless it is from a team in the bottom half of the table.
