Royals v Racing -1
Racing heads out to Salt Lake City, a place where they have had zero success, looking to change their fortunes. Utah started to turn things around as a franchise at the tail end of the last season and have come out looking even better this season. For those unaware, Salt Lake City sits over 4000 feet above sea level, which sometimes is used as a headwind for playing against the Royals. Katie O’Kane played in Salt Lake City for 3 seasons as a Utah Ute and said that she advised her teammates that the whole altitude thing was only a factor if you let it be. I tend to agree that playing at altitude probably doesn’t impact the average athlete all that much, unless they have an underlying health condition.
Racing is coming off of its best match of the season (so far…fingers crossed) and it is a little difficult to move past that match because there were so many interesting things that happened in retrospect. Something that flew a little under the radar because Racing won and Sears scored, was the fact that she started on the bench. I asked Bev about this both immediately after the match and yesterday, and what she both times really didn’t tell me what everyone wants to know: was benching Sears tactical, for rest, or something else? Let’s ignore the “why” because we will likely never know, so let’s look at the impact. Brendan Devine mentioned on BTRD this week that Lo Milliet’s heatmap was interesting. I went back and checked it out and she was deployed forward quite a bit. I don’t get too worked up about formations, but I did want to go back and get a sense of Racing’s defensive structure. To me, the heatmaps don’t actually show a back 3, which may have been postulated with Milliet playing so far forward. Honestly, I was checking for any winger inversion that I might have missed live. When I think of winger inversion, I think of a left or right back moving centrally into the midfield. That wasn’t what was going on. What was happening was that Morris was covering Milliet’s forward runs. Their heatmaps were so similar if you didn’t know who the nominal right back was, the map wouldn’t have told you. On the left side, McMahon and Hase’s maps make it clear, but McMahon got forward almost as much as Milliet. I guess my biggest point is that Racing played with different structures with Morris on the pitch instead of Sears. If you go back on look at the heatmaps for Racing’s other win against the Pride, you see some pretty standard winger heatmaps. Petersen was the left back in that match, so that was different too.
I think we may see Racing start to deploy some tactical things from the start of matches that maybe we haven’t seen as much in the past. Against Portland, a team that doesn’t possess the ball that much, you can afford to have all of your wingers as high as Racing deployed them. Utah neither scores, nor concedes as much as Racing, so it will be interesting to see how they play. They do tend to possess the ball more than their opponents, but not by a tremendous amount. Utah sets up similar to Racing from a formation perspective which is also similar to how Portland set up.
I definitely liked O’Kane in a higher role, so it will be interesting to see if that continues. The Flint/O’Kane/Fischer midfield was definitely more effective when they didn’t have to defend quite as much in their final third. If Jean returns (no official word on that until later today or tomorrow) I think McMahon has done enough to keep her spot at left back over Petersen, who deputized well at center back. I expect that Sears will start, but despite her excellent play I don’t think Milliet is guaranteed to start at right back every match with Morris as a clear option there. I expect that now that the roster is healthier, we could see some more tactically influenced rotation.
