The NWSL’s second random Woso Wednesday didn’t just fail to live up to its older sibling’s sixteen goal, it punted the ball into a neighbor’s yard. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t intrigue across the three matches, just that they resulted in just three goals.

A 1-0 to loss to last year’s champions doesn’t seem so bad for the Dash, but the manner in which it played out certainly was. Fran Alonso isn’t long for this job I fear.

The difference between a struggling Utah Royals squad and a struggling San Diego Wavé squad turned out to be Jaedyn Shaw, whomst could have guessed. And Laura Harvey successfully defanged the Current’s attack, but not without heroics from goalkeeper Laurel Ivory and sacrificing Ji So-yun to Kansas City’s defense.

Anyway, here’s what all of that looked like according to StatsBomb’s xG race charts and passing networks.

houston dash 0-1 nj/ny gotham fc

Fran…

dash

Fraaaan…..

gotham

Gotham accepted the Dash’s invite to pour into their half and the good news is that they zipped the ball around and created 19 shots that totaled 2.25xG, the bad news is that they only scored one goal.

san diego wavé 2-0 utah royals

Casey Stoney elected to play Jaedyn Shaw and María Sánchez because those are players on her team that she is allowed to select, and they were involved in creating or taking eight of the team’s nine shots. Including Shaw’s perfect throughball for their only non-penalty goal.

wavé

Jaedyn Shaw as a 10: A Theory. A Concept. A Hypothesis. An Idea.

royals

Not sure I understand the Royals having a lot of center midfielders yet consistently generating pass maps with no one in midfield.

seattle reign 0-0 kc current

Harvey said the one thing we’re not gonna do is let y’all run around all willy nilly, if we happen to score so be it but that’s none of my business.

reign

Laurel Ivory stood on her head and probably had several ice packs strapped to her postgame but the Reign managed to keep the (once?) hottest team in the league without a goal for the first time this season.

current

Seattle clearly were not going to get drawn out so it was up to the Current to manufacture chances. By pure numbers, they did fine, and generated 19 shots. The quality, however, was less good — only .06xG per shot. Only two of their shots had an xG value over .10. Oof.

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