hey that was neat: manaka turns up, temwa ain't just about goals, and olivia moultrie hurts my feelings

It’s time for your dose of #neat from NWSL week 15. My aim is for these to hit your inbox every Wednesday, but I ran into a video embedding snag that’s making my life annoying. The one I sent last week looked all perfect and lovely in preview mode, but email clients didn’t actually load the Streamable videos I embedded. Ugh.

Anyway, I’ll keep working on that but in the meantime here’s the #neat I found in last weekend’s games.

manaka matsukubo is leveling up something fierce

North Carolina’s weird, coach-aided constrained season has been frustrating for multiple reasons. For me, a primary one is that they have hoarded some of the most elite, unpredictable and fun attacking talents then artificially reduced the moments in which they can cook.

There’s a relentlessly fun side to be deployed from this collection of players, and every now and then you get a glimpse of it for a few minutes before someone on the sideline says ‘that’s quite enough of that’. Against Houston, Manaka Matsukubo provided several of these moments in the first half hour of the game.

This is a supercut of extremely #neat things Manaka did in the first twenty-seven minutes of the match. The first (4’) was a filthy curling, hanging cross that would have been the assist of the week had Hannah Betfort been able to get to it before Jane Campbell. Then (9’) Manaka bailed out some pretty sus playing out of the back by receiving a difficult pass but turning herself and the ball into space with a clever flick that sprung a counter. She also kept running to receive the ball at the other end and make a nice move in the box to create a crossing opportunity.

Eighteen minutes later she was well-positioned to receive a pass in the box after a high press from Denise O’Sullivan claimed the ball. The pass was hit too hard but Manaka improvised and hit a nasty little backheel to Jaedyn Shaw at the top of the box (which helped draw a foul that would become a penalty). Heavens.

Matsukubo has been having a low key exceptional season in terms of goals added (g+). Currently she’s dropping .06 goals added (g+) per 96 minutes, which is good for eighth highest in the season so far (min. 1,000 minutes played).

Her effectiveness comes from passing, receiving the ball, and drawing fouls in dangerous areas. It’s frustrating because North Carolina have just 18 goals from a total of 21.67 xG for the season, which breaks down to 1.44 per game and is good enough for 5th in the league. That no one thinks of the Courage as a top-5 attack in the NWSL is a problem the next coach(es) have to figure out.

temwa chawinga is ruder than you think

Rudely, it’s not enough for Temwa Chawinga to be the most inevitable attacker in the world. No, she has to also go around being all sorts of unselfish and helping out her defense, too.

Against Utah, she was literally everywhere. Yeah sure she eventually won the game by scoring the only goal in the 87th minute and in truly absurd fashion but that’s not what we’re concerned with here. She also did lots of under-celebrated work that played its part in defusing several instances of hope the Royals might’ve had in possession.

According to Fotmob, Chawinga was only credited with 1 clearance, 5 ball recoveries and 1/1 tackles won. But her willingness to use her speed and anticipation in pressing and defensive situations means those numbers are an incomplete story of how Temwa impacted the game when her team wasn’t in possession.

olivia moultrie hurt my feelings

If I am not the president of the Sam Meza Hive I am somewhere on its leadership team. I enjoy how doggedly all about midfielding she is. She doesn’t want shots at goal and is completely unaffected by the siren call of the final third that many midfielders—particularly U.S. midfielders—cannot resist. She wants to cover ground east-to-west, win the ball, and work out how (and to whom) to progress it. Real midfielder tings.

Sometimes though, this dogged single-track intensity can be taken advantage of, especially if it finds itself in the wrong spaces. One of those spaces last weekend was facing Olivia Moultrie 1v1 in the box. Moultrie used Meza’s determination against her with a simple but filthy move that hurt my feelings.

Ouch. Of the many varied happenings on a soccer pitch one of my favorites is when a player can manipulate a defender without touching the ball. The peak of the genre is Tobin Heath making a South Korea defender do a full backwards tumble with nothing but the quickest of shoulder shimmies. It lives in my head rent free.

Moultrie took from this playbook to completely sell Meza a fake Rolex. “No no, it’s real,” she said, lying. “You can tell by the weight,” she said, liarfully. “I’ll tell you a secret, real Rolexes have a tiny, engraved heart that confirms it was handcrafted,” she explained, lying liarly. Meza bought it and was happily on her way home when it broke apart into seven pieces in her pocket.

Dammit.

bonus: nothing beats a jet2 holiday

@trinity.rodman

200 pounds off if u come to a spirit game 😭😂