Elizabeth’s photo gallery from the match

Visit the photo gallery here.

Stolen The Wire Epigraph

“That all there is to it?”

For those of you who haven’t seen The Wire, it is a light-hearted drama where Idris Elba encourages inner city youth to chase the West Baltimore dream (selling dope and coke on the corner and dying before reaching 21).

The answer to the question listed above is “yup, pretty much.”

Get to halftime in decent shape. Throw on a couple of game-changing subs. Hold on in the final minutes.

That was the recipe for success for the Spirit. Unlike Mitch’s Hedberg’s recipe for homemade Sprite, I am sure there was more stuff in the recipe, but you get the point.

Post Match Moment of the Match

I asked Kanu how many minutes she was ready for, and the gist of her answer was “as many as the coaches will give me”. Personally, I was disappointed that she only got 10-ish and that those minutes were when the Spirit had abandoned any attacking pretense. Kanu is best in transition and on the counter. I would have liked to see her in the 60th minute when match was theoretically still in doubt. However, she is coming off of an injury, so maybe there was a restriction. I find it hard to believe that the restriction was “10 minutes only”, but who knows. I asked Bev if she thought that Racing has game changers to bring in like Spirit. I think she said that answer was yes, but Bev went on one of her rhetorical detours before getting back around to any semblance of an answer.

However, THE Post Match Moment of the Match was when Joe Havelda asked Bev point blank: Where are the goals going to come from? It is an excellent question, and I was so pleasantly surprised that anyone was bold enough to ask it that I kind of forgot to listen for an answer. I went back and listened and was not shocked to find that Bev didn’t really answer that question anyway. I don’t know what I would have said, and I wouldn’t hold up Marlo Stanfield as a role model, but his position on when the numbers were down in his shop, is that he for damn sure went out and did something about it.

Stink-O-Meter

Blissfully 0 out of 5. Smellier days are coming, so enjoy these while they last.

0 for 2 home matches with offensive odors…

Let’s keep the streak alive, but maybe without the preceding flood next time.

What did I miss?

I must have missed something because this banner seems delightfully out of left field. I feel like we might collectively be missing some context here, but I know for sure that I am. Bekki Morgan and I discussed the banner (which I have to say that I enjoy immensely) and her thoughts were that since Racing is going with a green theme this season and that California (Sav’s home state) produces its fair share of avocados that those two factoids provide some context. Maybe so, but it still seems quite bizarre. You also have to make the extra mental leap from avocado to guacamole for the chip thing to make sense (unless you know someone who dips their chips into a halved avocado with the pit still inside). So weird…I love it!

If anybody has any extra context, please DO NOT tell me. I enjoy it much more without it.

GREATEST BANNER EVER!!!

More non sequitur food-based player banners, please. Especially those where the pun only makes sense if you mispronounce the fruit.

Baby, baby…where did our Purp go?

If you stumbled across my preview for All for XI you might have come across my complaint about “Go Big Purp” already, but now I feel like I need to expand. For the second home match in a row, Racing has decided to go with its green kits at home. I hate this. I am not a superstitious person in the least, nor do I believe that “karma” is tied to such things, but I think at a minimum, consistently refusing to wear your primary colors at home is bad form. Lou City do this too when they decide to wear their usually god-awful 3rd kits at home near the end of the season.

Honestly, only the houndstooth kit has really felt like a true home kit for Racing in my opinion. The first couple of seasons established white at the away color for Racing and the first ever kit was more black (midnight violet if you’re nasty) than purple. The only season with any decent amount of “purp” was Paige Monaghan’s only season here in which she coined the phrase.

I have been indifferent to the slogan (it’s better than “Run with Us”) since its inception. Elizabeth has hated it from the get-go. I don’t have any evidence that Paige Monaghan put a curse on the motto when she was left unprotected by Racing in the 2024 expansion draft. I also don’t have any evidence that she didn’t put a curse on the motto, either. That last sentence is pretty ridiculous, but you’ve seen the state of logical thinking in this country so that sentence might make actual sense to half of the populace.

Ultimatum: Wear the purpliest kit at home or ditch the slogan! Failure to comply will lead to further and more intense mocking!

Did the club/stadium have good food?

Yes!

The Tandoori Chicken Salad Wraps were good, especially in the cucumber yogurt dipping sauce. They were a hit with all of us. Pertinent to this time of the year, the Derby pie was good too (solid B, not as good as homemade, but good for a mass-produced version). The club has also moved to canned soft drinks over fountain drink offerings from the previous years. On a chilly day, like yesterday, one’s hands might get a little cold carrying drinks back to your seats, but those cold aluminum cans might be useful on a really hot day.

“But there it is, and there we are.”

Desire As/Steve McQueen/1985

I think the level has been set now. We have four results to judge and at least for me, Racing is who I thought they were. The team is still missing a few players that when 100% available, can change games, but none that can change fortunes. We are already starting to see the rookies take minutes from veteran players, and we have to infer from that reality that those minutes have been given to the players who are performing better in Bev’s system. The other side of that coin is that we can also pretty much infer that the roster at the end of last season was in miserable shape in the eyes of the club/staff.

I said in my preview that any point for Racing would have been good here. Based on the first 45 minutes, I thought it could still be in their reach, but Santos’ stunning free kick in the 58th minute put any hopes to rest. The Spirit can be prone to scoring early in matches and not closing them out, but the 58th minute isn’t early, and Racing never posed much of a threat until Washington went into cruise control after their second. It was not a point I expected Racing to get, so the loss shouldn’t impact their quest for the playoffs. They will need to turn some draws into wins against mediocre competition to achieve that feat. They aren’t going to threaten a really good team unless they have a fantastic match and yesterday wasn’t one of those times.

The lack of goal scoring is a concern, which is bad, but I will say the back line is in better shape than I thought it would be. I really like Hase in the minutes I have seen from her. Flint was okay in front of them, but she has to offer more going forward if Borges is going to play like she did yesterday. I will give Bekki credit for this insight, but Borges plays much better when she shares the pitch with DeMelo. I think she might need to play further up the pitch, but at the moment she isn’t playing well enough to displace anyone up there (although I do think Weber may be better as a substitute at this point). Goals need to come from somewhere and Fischer has been given 4 matches to show what she can do. For all of her good qualities, I don’t think she is a natural goal scorer.

Racing needs natural goal scorers because they look nowhere near manufacturing a goal from open play with sustained possession. Set pieces and counters still look like the most likely routes to a goal for this team. I think Fischer got really close to snatching possession away in a dangerous spot a couple of times, but the fact is that she ultimately didn’t do it.

The good news is that Racing won’t face another juggernaut (in my opinion) until June 14th when they face Kansas City and then Orlando right after that on the 20th. They have time to get things sorted out and hopefully can get heathier, especially up front.

Did you know?

Since I seemed to have a “there” theme in my head, did you know that the Gorillaz song “Dare” is called that because Happy Mondays’ front man Shuan Ryder can’t pronounce “there” due to his heavy Mancunian accent?

"That all there is to it?"