It was another wonderful weekend of NWSL chaos chaos’ing. We had Barbra Banda introducing herself, Soph Smith scoring first half brace, and a slew of intriguing tactical battles (even if some of those battles were between a team and themselves).

Here’s what it all looked like according to StatsBomb’s xG race charts & pass networks. Feel free to grab and share these if you want, they are for the people (and if you want to plug where you got them from, whomst am I to stop you).

washington spirit 2-3 orlando pride

Barbra Banda directly contributed to all three Orlando goals, and getting three goals from .69 non-penalty xG is exactly why you sign Barbra Banda.

spirit

At first Paige Metayer for Ashley Hatch appeared to signal a formation change, but nah.

pride

The scary thing is that the Pride will keep improving their play around Banda, which was their primary missing piece at the start of the season. This team could get really terrifying really quickly.

angel city fc 1-3 kc current

Angel City fought and scrapped until they couldn’t anymore, and then it got ugly. Or hilarious, depending on your point of view.

angel city

For the most part, the base of the midfield and defense seem to be fine, it’s building out from there that’s leaving a lot of players disconnected.

current

This is hilarious. I don’t even know what this is. Vlatko, sir, you vex me. You vex me greatly.

nc courage 1-0 seattle reign fc

Laura Harvey simply refuses to let her team play football until somewhere around the hour mark.

courage

By now this is pretty routine from the Courage. I still think Nahas should keep trying to find a central focal point in the forward line, they ended up with the three points, but were a late Reign goal away from throwing away points yet again.

reign

Oh, Harvs.

utah royals 0-0 houston dash

/snores /groans /rolls over /sighs

royals

Midfield is lava!!

dash

Shoutout to Fran Alonso’s innovative 4-1-5 with every player closer to the halfway line than the final third.

chicago red stars 0-2 sophia smith

A variation of what I said above about Barbra Banda also applies to Sophia Smith.

red stars

Sophia Smith’s early brace forced Chicago into a game they aren’t yet familiar playing under Lorne Donaldson, and it showed. The bulk of their best chances came from set piece situations, not open play.

thorns

Goals change games. Soph did the work and Portland held on to give Coach Kenough his second win in as many games.

san diego wavé fc 2-1 bay fc

This game was fun as hell.

wavé

Didn’t expect this lineup from Casey Stoney but it very much reads as an ‘I’m proving a point’ XI. We’ll see if things return to normal next week, but Emily van Egmond and Jaedyn Shaw coming on helped in pretty obvious ways.

bay

Life with Loera is off to a tough start. Tess Boade was quite good defensively, but losing her from the forward line led to a disjointed attack.

nj/ny gotham fc 1-1 rahsing louisville

“That’s the NWSL: It’s wild, but it’s fun.”
–Our greatest living philosopher, Rose Lavelle

gotham

Availability hasn’t helped but Gotham’s trademark organized chaos that got them last year’s championship has so far been just straight up chaos in 2024. This, however, is much better.

rahsing

This comment has nothing to do with the pass network shown below I just feel it needs to be said: More Emma Sears, please.

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