The seven-week Olympic break couldn’t come at a better time for Angel City FC, as Saturday’s 2-1 loss to NJ/NY Gotham FC saw the team lose three straight games, post just one win in nine games and score just one goal in the past 275 minutes.
At a time when they should be climbing up the rankings, Angel City is falling.
“Nobody wants to sit here with only four wins,” coach Becky Tweed said. “The team is disappointed. The best thing about this league is you can’t be disappointed for long. You’ve got to move on and keep going.”
“There’s a real opportunity in the second half of the season. We have to think, ‘What do we want from the season?’, ‘How do we approach it?’ and we have to go from there straight away.”
Early may be a relative term, as Angel City doesn’t play an NWSL game until Aug. 24. In the meantime, the pressure will be on Tweed and her staff to figure out exactly what went wrong.
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“It’s frustrating when everything doesn’t line up perfectly,” captain Ali Reilly said. “The effort is unquestionable. The quality of the final pass, the quality of the shot, tracking the runner, those are the things that have to be questioned. We have to be accountable and we have to get better.”
“If someone on the field isn’t doing it, someone else is going to get that opportunity. I think we’ll see that later in the season.”
They saw that happen last season when Tweed took over from Freya Coombe in mid-June after the team was in 11th place in the NWSL standings. Under Tweed, Angel City went unbeaten in 10 of its final 11 NWSL games and clinched a playoff spot on the final day of the season.
Angel City (4-9-3) will once again enter the break in 11th place with 10 games remaining, just three points out of the playoff zone, and with the transfer window open during the break, Tweed expects the team to look different when it returns to NWSL action.
She is almost certain to welcome back forward Christian Press, who has been sidelined for two years with a torn anterior cruciate ligament, and the coach is also hoping for further reinforcements.
“It’s surprising that you don’t see every team trying to sign players in this transfer market,” she said. “Every team is growing. Every team is adding players in the transfer market.”
“This is a good opportunity for us to reset and refresh a bit. Everyone needs this time off to rest a bit mentally and physically, and we have to come back with the attitude, energy, drive and tenacity that we brought to the second half of last season.”
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Or the second half on Saturday. After conceding first-half goals from Rose Lavelle and Delaney Sheehan, Angel City rallied for the final 45 minutes and cut the deficit in half with a Claire Emslie penalty in the 69th minute, but never got any closer.
Lavelle was a dangerous presence for much of the 60 minutes, quickly stringing together five passes and standing alone in the center of the box to score an easy goal in the 16th minute to give Gotham (9-3-4) the lead.
Sheehan, a UCLA Hermann Trophy semifinalist, doubled the lead just before halftime when Ella Stevens drew Angel City goalkeeper Didi Haracic to the top of the six-yard box and fed a low, left-footed pass to a free Sheehan for her first goal of the season.
Emslie’s team-high sixth goal came after Giselle Thompson was brought down in the box by Gotham’s Mandy Freeman, drawing a foul that led to a penalty. But the goal proved costly: Thompson left BMO Stadium with a protective boot on her right foot.
Haracic made seven saves, tying his regular-season career high.
Attendance was announced as 16,542, the smallest of the season and the second-lowest in Angel City history, even though the team led the league in average home attendance over the weekend with 19,865.
This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
