Week 11 recap: We won in our hearts

Well it happened. Gotham got Chesky’d.

We’re not entirely sure what karmic debt Gotham was repaying with this officiating, but we have a couple of guesses:

1. Gotham not changing their social media pages to a Pride profile picture for June

2. Sonnett picking her gum up off the field and putting it back in her mouth

The Bats fell to the Kansas City Current 1-2 Saturday afternoon, giving up two early goals and benefitting from a late own goal at the club’s annual Pride game. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and we’re counting this one as a win. Here’s why:

1. Gotham scored 3 goals (and should’ve had the opportunity to score a 4th)

2. Gotham fought back (for the first time in a very long time)

3. Rose Lavelle is back and as good as ever

Let’s get into it.

First, a quick match recap

Gotham had its shortest injury report in a while ahead of this match. Tierna Davidson (SEI) and Shelby Hogan (D45) were out as expected, Jess Carter and Jéssica Silva were out on excused absence, and Gabi Portilho was still out with her hip injury (although she recently got called up to play for Brazil in the upcoming Copa América Feminina, which is hopefully a sign that we will see her back on the pitch for Gotham soon!). Most notably, Rose Lavelle was listed as questionable, and ended up making the matchday squad.

Carter’s absence forced some creativity on the defensive line, and head coach Juan Carlos Amorós opted for the least disruptive path, slotting defensive midfielder Nealy Martin in her place and allowing Mandy Freeman, Lilly Reale, and Taryn Torres to play in their usual positions on the pitch. However, he opted for some disruption higher up the pitch, benching Sarah Schupansky and instead playing Ella Stevens in the attacking midfielder role. 

Scoring opened up in the 3rd minute of the match, when the unconventional center back pairing of Nealy Martin and Emily Sonnett gave the ball away to 2024 NWSL MVP Temwa Chawinga just outside of the 18 yard box. 

Kansas City’s pressure paid off, and Chawinga was able to combine with Michelle Cooper on the right wing to score Kansas City’s first goal of the match. Kansas City deserves credit for being able to capitalize on this opportunity, and Gotham deserves criticism for this giveaway. We’ll give Nealy Martin a little grace because she hasn’t spent a ton of time this far back, but we will criticize the Gotham front office for allowing there to be a situation in which Nealy Martin has to play center back (and this isn’t even the first time this season!). At the end of the day, this was still very much an unforced error that put Gotham on the back foot early on. 

Kansas City then struck again in the 11th minute.

The story of this goal was the Gotham defense getting beat in transition, but it’s also important to recognize how the Current were able to slice through Gotham’s midfield with no problem at all—Kansas City should not have been able to identify such easy progressive passes. By the time the ball gets forward, the Gotham backline is simply not fast enough to keep up with Kansas City attackers Michelle Cooper and Temwa Chawinga and they get punished for it. Lilly Reale on the left keeps Chawinga onside centrally, and suddenly Gotham is down by 2. 

In the 20th minute, Ella Stevens went down with a non-contact ankle injury, and Sarah Schupansky subbed in for her in the 26th. Speaking in post-match media appearances, Amorós said, “with Ella, we still need to also see what was exactly with her. I think the first opinions are not too much.” We’re taking “not too much” to mean she suffered not too much of an injury, but we now know that she will not be playing against the Utah Royals this week.

Schupansky’s substitution ended up being pretty impactful—Gotham having an attacking player who generally plays as an attacking midfielder ended up making a huge difference, as we can see their attacking momentum picked up right around when she came on and didn’t really let up much through the rest of the match.

The rest of the first half was pretty uneventful, save for this sequence.

Sarah Schupansky beats Kansas City midfielder Vanessa DiBernardo, Emily Sonnett then attempts a slide tackle (and recovers beautifully), and then Ann-Katrin Berger reacts to the ball being punted upfield by going way out of her box for a slide tackle on 2024 league MVP Temwa Chawinga. Wild sequence of events.

The next big bit of action we saw was the first disallowed goal that Gotham scored, in the 49th. 

Sonnett seems to finally break her off-target header curse and gets the ball into the back of the net off a corner. This goal ended up being disallowed because of a foul committed in the process. The Kansas City defender definitely sold her fall, but Sonnett got two hands on her so she had no case. Gotham is still down by 2.

In the 52nd minute, play was halted due to a handball in the box.

Esther ends up with the ball in the box and makes a touch that hits the hand of a Kansas City defender, changing the trajectory of the ball. Esther stays with it, and the play ends with her getting tripped up on Elizabeth Ball’s knee. Center referee Danielle Chesky spent a lot of time waiting for instructions from the rest of the refereeing team, but ultimately this case did not even make it to the monitor—there was a moment where it seemed like Chesky might be headed to take a closer look, but she instead walked over to the Gotham bench issue a yellow card to assistant goalkeeping coach Michelle Betos. We recognize that we’re extremely biased here, but this really felt like it at the very least warranted a closer look by the center referee.

Then, in the 63rd minute, Geyse sent a ball into the box that was poorly cleared by KC defender Ellie Wheeler.

Esther capitalized on this mistake, sent the ball into the back of the net, and then promptly collected it and brought it back to the center circle for kickoff. The Kansas City Current had already restarted play when the referee decided to take a closer look.

The goal was ultimately called back because Esther was in an offside position at the time of Geyse’s initial ball, and the referee ruled that the offside position did not reset when the Kansas City player cleared the ball. The question here is whether the striker should be let off the hook for their initial offside position or if the defender should be let off the hook for their poor defensive work, and the referee team chose to side with the defender in this case. However, this ruling happened after play had restarted, which was pretty controversial.

The next notable event came in the 67th minute, when Midge Purce was taken out by a Kansas City player on a hard tackle. The tackle was not ruled a foul, but play was eventually stopped in order for her to receive medical care. Speaking on the injury in pre-match media appearances ahead of Gotham’s week 12 match against Utah, Amorós noted that “Midge, unfortunately, got hurt after that tackle. I think that the less we speak about that game, the better.” Purce will be out for the Utah game at the very least, and seemingly for longer. 

Finally, in the 111th minute, Gotham got on the scoreboard at last, with a goal that couldn’t possibly be taken away from them. 

Rose Lavelle’s pressure forced Kansas City to get a touch on Geyse’s cross that ultimately ended up in the back of the net, and Gotham got one back with absolutely no time to create another goal and force a draw.

The game kicked off again, and within a minute the final whistle blew and the game ended Gotham FC 1-2 Kansas City Current.

Although the scoreline didn’t go Gotham’s way, there were still some notable positives to take away from this match.

Gotham fought back

It’s no secret here that Gotham reacts terribly to conceding first. Since the start of the 2024 season, Gotham has not won a single game when conceding first, and this year Gotham hasn’t even drawn a game in that state. This game felt different, however. It’s important to note that with a 2 goal lead 11 minutes into the match, Kansas City was perhaps a bit more willing than the average team to let Gotham create chances for themselves, but Gotham was also able to turn those chances into goals. 

Since the start of 2024, there have been 10 matches (not including this one) where Gotham conceded first. If we leave out the April 2024 match against Racing Louisville (in which Gotham first conceded in the 95th minute), Gotham has generated an average of 0.7 npxG after conceding their first goal, and an average of 0.36 npxG after conceding a second, in the five matches where they had conceded more than one. In this match Gotham generated a total of 0.88 xG after conceding, 0.78 of which came after Kansas City’s second goal. In that same time period, Gotham has also attempted an average of 8.1 shots after conceding, and in this match the Bats managed 11. 

Finally, if we zoom in and look at just this season, Gotham has generated an average of 0.67 xG after conceding, and if we leave out Gotham’s goal against Portland that tied the game at 1-1 (0.53 xG), they have created an average of 0.54 xG. This match saw Gotham generate its second-highest total xG after conceding, and its highest xG after conceding twice. It’s important to note that this game’s figure does not even count the xG from disallowed goals and the forced own goal, so in actuality Gotham produced even more. Hopefully this is a sign of a team turning over a new leaf and learning to fight back (maybe unequivocally legally next time) after going down.

Rose Lavelle returns

Nothing much to say here, just enjoy these clips of her dribbling out of tight spaces and join us in getting excited to see more of this!

Teammate Nealy Martin had high praise for Lavelle. “Every day she comes in and she’s there before us and stays after us, working to get her ankle, you know, back to full health. So this was really awesome to see her out there and actually, you know, see all of her progress come to fruition… She’s an incredible human.”

The part where we talk about the refereeing

Ok, we really hate to be these people. Referees in this league are very underappreciated and also definitely not given the resources they need to adequately perform the job that is being asked of them. However, it is also true that the officiating in this game was abysmal, and that it is ok to be upset about that. A lot of the focus online has been on the disallowed goals and the uncalled handball—and rightfully so, because goals change games and these felt like fringe cases that could’ve gone either way—but there technically are laws that would disallow each of those goals, and as upset as we can be that those calls didn’t go our way, we’re going to give the center referee and the VAR team a little grace here and emphasize that there does in fact exist a rule for them to turn to. 

What is less excusable, in our opinion, is the inconsistency with which foul calls were being made. It’s true that the referee team did not force Gotham to give away two goals early, but that doesn’t mean that the players, coaching staff, and fans don’t have a right to be upset at how the refereeing affected the game overall. “I think we really need to keep an eye on how we are really protecting players,” remarked head coach Juan Carlos Amorós. 

The first foul of the game was called in the very first minute of the match.

KC midfielder Rocky Rodríguez was already going down after receiving a ball, and Midge Purce took the opportunity to take the ball away from her and start an attack the other way. This attack was cut off by the whistle. 

Similarly, the whistle blew here on a play where the Kansas City player was already on her way down before any contact.

Fans who were at the stadium might remember this moment as the one where the normally measured Ann-Katrin Berger fell to her knees.

And here, Lilly Reale gets a foul call for pretty standard shoulder-to-shoulder play.

Kansas City players realized that diving would earn them foul calls, and unfortunately that’s just part of the game. The center referee set the tone early that there was going to be a low tolerance for contact this match. However, Kansas City quickly realized that they same standard wasn’t being applied to them. When they didn’t get a yellow card for this foul on AKB…

… or for this challenge on Midge Purce…

… it was made clear that Kansas City didn’t have to police themselves on the fouls they committed. What all of this culminated in was a hard challenge on Midge Purce that ultimately took her out for both this game and at the very least the next.

Purce was completely taken out by a Kansas City defender who didn’t get any of the ball and play continued for another 30 or so seconds as the center ref signaled to play on. She then halted play and issued a yellow card to the defender responsible, but the play continuing on here where a player was seriously injured and not earlier, where literally no foul occurred, was an interesting inconsistency in refereeing.

When the referee lets players get away with harsh tackles, they are allowed to become more and more dangerous until someone is finally seriously hurt. As Juan Carlos Amorós put it, “It has to be better. You know, like protecting players and applying rules of the game. We need to—we need to do a better job. All right.”

We’re not going to fault the Kansas City players for taking advantage of the knowledge that this referee was letting them get away with a lot while also calling a foul against a Gotham player anytime they dived, and we also feel uncomfortable blaming an individual referee who is not even doing this as a full time job. Instead, what this shows is that if the NWSL wants to grow as a league, it needs to do a better job of both protecting its players and protecting the integrity of the game, and that can only come with more investment in its officiating staff. 

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Looking ahead to next match

The Bats have traveled west to take on the Utah Royals tonight, June 13th, at 9:30 PM ET. The Royals sit in 13th place in NWSL standings, with one win, two draws, and eight losses to their name. The team is anchored by former Gotham FC goalkeeper Mandy McGlynn, whose performances last season earned her a regular spot on the USWNT. 

Players to watch out for include attacker Ally Sentnor, who won the US Soccer Young Female Player of the Year award in 2024, and defensive midfielder Claudia Zornoza, who last season had exceptional passing/progressive play and defense among midfielders. Gotham desperately needs a win this week, but the odds are stacked against the Bats, who have been hit with two more injuries on the front line. 

Thumbnail courtesy of Gotham FC.