Week 12 recap: NWSL after dark

To be honest, we’re not entirely sure what happened to Gotham Friday night. On paper, the Bats defeated the Utah Royals 3-0, with a brace from Esther and a first regular season goal from Jaelin Howell. 

The positives: 

1. Gotham scored! 

2. Gotham maintained a clean sheet

3. Gotham secured a very important three points

The negatives:

1. Jess Carter got a red card

2. Jaelin Howell got a red card

3. Ann-Katrin Berger might be injured

There’s a lot to discuss—let’s get into it.

A quick match recap

Gotham got things started early, with a goal in the 9th minute off the head of Esther González.

This play starts with Jaelin Howell picking the ball off of a Utah player and immediately handing it off to Taryn Torres. Torres stumbles forward through some contact before recognizing the space that Bruninha has on the right side and sending the ball there. Bruninha passes the ball back to Mandy Freeman, who then passes way forward to Sarah Schupansky. Schupansky cuts the ball across to make space for herself to cross the ball into the box, where Esther has timed her run perfectly to get on the end of it. An incredible ball from Schupansky and an intelligent play from Esther has Gotham up 1-0 early with their first regular season goal since April (not counting own goals). This was a great team play, and the patience in passing and finding space ultimately paid off.

Utah then nearly equalized in the 25th minute.

AKB’s heroics were the only thing that kept this from being a goal. Gotham fails to close in on 2024 US Soccer Young Player of the Year Ally Sentnor, who as a result has space to carry the ball forward and pick out Mina Tanaka on the left side. Tanaka sends a beautiful low ball across the box to Bianca St. Georges, who is able to get to the ball because Lilly Reale has lost her, and ultimately AKB’s left foot alone keeps Gotham up by one.

The next big moment came in the first minute of first half stoppage time.

Following a save, AKB punts the ball to Lilly Reale on the left, who has a great header to Geyse. Geyse manages to receive the ball and turn while being held, and sends an excellent through ball to Jaelin Howell who is in space. Howell has even more space while dribbling forward as the central defenders commit to marking Esther, who is drifting out to the right. The defender on Howell never had a chance, and by the time one of Esther’s bodyguards realizes that Jaelin has space to shoot, it’s too late. Gotham is up by 2 right at the end of the half. Gotham benefitted here from some very terrible defending, but credit is due to Geyse for the incredible through ball, to Esther for drawing defenders out wide and giving Howell space, and to Howell herself for recognizing the position she was in and being able to slip the ball past the keeper. Seeing this play, we can’t help but wonder what a weapon Esther could be as a defensive target if Gotham had other players who could consistently benefit from that extra space and produce a shot on target. But again, 9 times out of 10 Gotham will be facing much better defense than this. 

The whistle blew and Gotham ended the half up 2-0 over the Utah Royals. Then, 11 minutes into the first half, Esther drew a penalty.

Lilly Reale switches the ball over to Bruninha, who has a beautiful ball forward into Esther’s run. Esther carries the ball into the box and then finds herself sandwiched between two defenders. She draws the foul, and the referee points to the spot.

In the 58th minute, Esther successfully converts the penalty in what may be the best executed penalty kick we’ve seen this season (although the bar is on the floor). She tucks the ball into the bottom left corner, out of Mandy McGlynn’s reach, while also striking it with so much power that it immediately ricochets off the back netting. Someone’s been in shooting practice.

Within the next 5 minutes (yes, we did the math), the sun has set, and it is officially NWSL after dark. 

In the 72nd minute, Ann-Katrin Berger attempted to pass the ball centrally to Jess Carter.

Her pass is pretty easily intercepted by Utah forward Mina Tanaka, and with AKB way out of goal, the Royals have a very good scoring opportunity here. Jess Carter pulls Tanaka down by her shirt and immediately earns herself a yellow.

For a while, it seems like that’s all this will be, until the referee heads over to the monitor to take a closer look and see if this was a Denial of an Obvious Goal-Scoring Opportunity (DOGSO) and therefore a red card. Vertically, Jess Carter is not the last line of defense (Mandy Freeman and AKB are further back than she is), but the question is more so whether those two could have reasonably covered enough ground horizontally to stop this play had Tanaka not been fouled. 

For us, there is not a clear cut answer here, but we don’t think that the ref’s decision to upgrade this to a red card was necessarily the wrong one. Tanaka had a really really good look on goal that the average player would more than likely convert into a goal. The question for us is whether Jess Carter made the right call here committing this (non-violent) red-card offense. On one hand, she made herself unavailable for Gotham’s next match against Bay FC in a position that Gotham doesn’t have a real replacement for her in (and Gotham had to go down to playing with 10 field players for the rest of the match). But on the other hand, she prevented a goal, and a possible momentum shift, with 20 minutes left in the game. We have no way of knowing how the game would have gone if that goal had been scored, but we will say that we are glad that Gotham came out of this game with the full 3 points.

Prior to Carter’s ejection, JCA was planning on taking off Jaelin Howell to put Rose Lavelle in the game, but after going down to 10 players he decided to instead leave the more defensive player in and take Geyse out instead. We’ll come back to this in a second.

In the 87th minute, Jaelin Howell received a yellow card. We don’t really see why on screen, (when asked if he knew the reason, Juan Carlos Amorós said “Not really. No.”) but it has been reported that this booking was for dissent. Shortly after this, Ann-Katrin Berger makes way for rookie keeper Ryan Campbell, the latter of whom is about to play in her first ever professional minutes.

Speaking on the decision to take AKB out, Amorós stated that, “I think it’s very early. The decision when I took it was precautionary. She’s a very important player for us, we want to take care of all of our players and obviously she had to be attended.” He also spoke up against criticism that the goalkeeper has been receiving for inducing timeouts in the middle of games, arguing that, “we need to trust on her especially since she’s I think the goalkeeper that receives the most tackles in the league by far. She’s really pushing hard and today she seemed to have a little issue so we decided to take her out.” We’re not really sure what to make of this, so we’ll see if she shows up on the availability report prior to the game against Bay.

Campbell was tested pretty instantly—a few minutes after she came on, Utah managed their second shot on target of the game.

Mina Tanaka, the woman of the hour, nutmegs the the ball through the legs of Jaelin Howell and creates space for herself to shoot. Unfortunately for her, the ball lands straight in the arms of Ryan Campbell, who, at the emphatic directive of Sonnett, falls to the ground with the ball to waste some time for her team.

In the 93rd minute, defender Lilly Reale is sandwiched between two Utah players and gets pushed into one of them, earning herself a bloody nose. Interestingly, Gotham does not use a concussion substitution here with only 6 minutes of stoppage time left to defend a 3 goal lead. Reale did stay off the pitch for a few minutes while she was being evaluated in concussion protocol before coming back on. In post-match comments to the media, Amorós described her condition as “absolutely fine” and noted that “she was wearing some stuff on her nose that seemed a little bit funny.”

The final bit of action we saw was in the 6th minute of second half stoppage time. With Reale still off the pitch and Gotham down to 8 field players defending a full-strength team, Jaelin Howell committed a foul that the referee deemed to be a yellow card-level offense.

It’s hard for us to tell how much intent there was here—the commentators even mentioned that it looks like Howell was trying to get out of the way. However, we can say that it was pretty dumb for Jaelin Howell to step on a player’s foot, studs down, while her team was already down a player and while she was already on a yellow for another very avoidable reason. Gotham will now be playing this week’s fixture against Bay FC missing both center back Jess Carter and center mid Jaelin Howell.

Three minutes later, the final whistle blew, and somehow, miraculously, despite all of this, Gotham finished the game with a clean sheet and more importantly, 3 points.

What should we be taking away from this win?

Gotham is starting to finish their chances

This match, Gotham scored 2 non-penalty goals off of 0.91 npxG. To put things into perspective, prior to this match they had scored 9 non-penalty goals off of 11.9 npxG. When we look at the PSxG, Gotham’s 3 non-penalty shots that were on target had a collective value of 1.55, so Gotham was also adding value with these shots. 

Gotham put up 5 non-penalty shots, 2 of which were on target, and created an average xG value of 0.18 xG per shot. These same shots had an average PSxG value of 0.31. For context the league average xG and PSxG per non-penalty shot this season are 0.10 and 0.11, respectively, so Gotham created some high-quality chances this game. These same numbers for Gotham prior to this match were 0.09 and 0.11, so this is a marked improvement over past performance this season. However, we must acknowledge that Gotham also didn’t create very many shots this match, falling short of their average of 11.8 shots per game prior to this match by nearly 6. A lot of this can be explained by the fact that Gotham didn’t really need to create a lot, taking the lead in the 9th minute of the game, but it’s still something worth remarking on.

Popular soccer statistics websites Fotmob and Sofascore both agreed that Gotham created 3 big chances, all of which turned into goals. Let’s also take a look at the chances that didn’t turn into goals, and see what we can take away from those.

Shot 1: 29’ Mandy Freeman

The first thing we want to note here is that this is the play where we saw Esther wrapped up in Sonnett’s embrace as the pair moved through the box in preparation for the incoming corner kick.

We love teamwork.

The actual shot here was a result of a short corner and the ball ended up near Mandy Freeman and she had enough space to attempt a shot off the volley. To her credit, she was not too far off. Worth a shot for sure. Since this was off a corner, however, we don’t have a ton to say here about the build-up to the shot, except for that short corners should be banned when Gotham has Sarah Schupansky on the pitch and Esther González in the box. 

Shot 2: 54’ Geyse

The lead up to this shot was perhaps our favorite build-up play of the match.

The play starts with Jess Carter finding a pocket for a long pass forward to Bruninha on the right, who then has a quick two-touch pass to Esther, who is immediately accosted by two Utah defenders.

Esther almost effortlessly carries the ball through so much contact, and is able to fire off a central pass to Sarah Schupansky, who is just outside of the box. Schupansky has a one-touch pass to Bruninha who is occupying the space left by the defenders who were covering Esther, and Bruninha sends an excellent cross towards the far post. There, Geyse is slightly off-balance after a very careful push by a Utah defender and her header ultimately ends up high, but this play was just so beautiful to watch.

Shot 3: 72’ Sarah Schupansky

Gotham’s last off-target shot (and last shot, period) came in the 72nd minute.

A Utah defender has a touch that is a little too heavy off of a pass from Utah keeper Mandy McGlynn and three Gotham players are at the scene and ready to pick the ball off of her. The ball ends up with Sarah Schupansky, who notices McGlynn is off her line and has a go at a high shot from distance in an attempt to chip the keeper. McGlynn is able to recover and by the time the ball gets to her, it’s pretty easy to pluck from the air.

All in all, we feel pretty optimistic seeing the play that led to each of Gotham’s 6 shots this game. Although they didn’t make many attempts at goal, we’re seeing a quality and confidence that this side lacked in May.

Gotham dominated this match

Statistically, Gotham dominated this game. 

Starting on the defensive end, Gotham won 57% of duels, including 58% of ground duels and 54% of aerial duels. The Bats limited Utah to only 5 touches in the penalty box (Gotham had 15), and also forced them to take 3 of their 6 shots from outside of the box (a difficult place to score from). 

Gotham was also better on the ball, which they had 53% of the time. They attempted and completed more passes (342/258 vs. 312/234), had way more passes in the opposition’s half (122 vs. 55) and touches in the attacking third (122 vs. 46), and attempted and successfully completed more take-ons (17/11 vs. 9/5). Gotham also lost control of the ball fewer times (15 vs. 20) and recovered more loose balls (47 vs. 42). In previous post-match media appearances following losses, a common theme in players’ explanation of the loss was failing to win first and second balls, and Gotham certainly succeeded at that this match, particularly in dangerous attacking areas.

The Bats also dominated in attack momentum for pretty much the entire match.

Gotham was definitely aware of its dominance when head coach Juan Carlos Amorós decided to take off a defensive midfielder (Taryn Torres), two attacking players, and a stalwart goalkeeper in favor of three attackers and a rookie keeper who had never seen professional minutes while the team was already down a player. While Gotham did play well in this game, they also benefited from this matchup against a team that has been playing unbelievably poorly. What we hope they’ll take away from this performance is some much needed confidence in their abilities, rather than a reliance on an opponent that will roll over.

Looking ahead to next match

The Bats next play Bay FC at home on Saturday, June 21st at 7:30 PM ET. This will be a tough one for Gotham, who will have two starters out on red card accumulation and somewhere between 1 and 4 wingers out due to injury/excused absence. Here are a few ways the Bats could line up on Saturday.

Option 1: Nealy Martin at center back, Taryn Torres at defensive midfielder, Josefine Hasbo at central midfielder.

Gotham announced the signing of Danish international midfielder Josefine Hasbo last week on a multi-year contract through the 2027 season. Hasbo previously played for the Harvard Crimson and has appeared 32 times for the Danish national team, starting in 5 of their 6 matches in this year’s UEFA Women’s Nations League. Hasbo also has professional club experience, having scored 11 times in 52 appearances for top flight Danish club Brøndby IF, including a goal in the UEFA Women’s Champions League. While she has an impressive amount of experience for her age, she is still very new to the team and to what has been described as a very complex system (particularly in the midfield), so it’s unclear whether head coach Juan Carlos Amorós will find her ready to start a match just yet, especially since she hasn’t gotten any game minutes. She is, however, the only true central midfielder on this roster.

If she ends up being prepared to start, a lot of Gotham’s other problems get solved. Nealy Martin can slot in at center back like she did against Kansas City two weeks ago, Taryn Torres can play the defensive midfielder role she’s been so good in this season, and Mandy Freeman can play right back. This also frees up Bruninha to play on the right wing if Ella Stevens, Midge Purce, and Gabi Portilho are all still out with injury (per Instagram, Jéssica Silva has joined the Portuguese national team as they gear up for the Euros, and with her contract ending on June 30th, it’s unclear whether we will see her play for Gotham again). 

Option 2: Taryn Torres in center midfield, Nealy Martin in defensive midfield, Mandy Freeman at center back, Bruninha at right back

If Hasbo can’t start, this is what we expect JCA to roll out on Saturday. The only question mark here is whether there will be someone who can fill in on the wing alongside Geyse. If none of the injured wingers are feeling well enough for substantial minutes, we could either see Sarah Schupansky start on the wing and Sofia Cook or Stella Nyamekye start in attacking midfield (or maybe even Rose Lavelle, if she’s up for a 45 minute stint), or we could see someone like Khyah Harper start on the wing and have Sarah Schupansky stay in the 10 role that she has been so, so effective in.

Option 3: 3-back with Lilly Reale, Emily Sonnett, and Mandy Freeman

This one is not going to happen—Juan Carlos Amorós really likes his game plan and never deviates from it. However, technically the team does have the option to go for a more defensive formation with 3 center backs and 2 wing-backs who push higher up the field in possession than traditional fullbacks do. This would free up Nealy Martin and Taryn Torres to play in the midfield together and just generally allow the attacking line to remain undisturbed. However, this would require the team sacrificing Reale’s crucial progressive play that her left-back position has allowed of her this season and also, as we already mentioned, this isn’t going to happen, and that’s probably for the best. 

Juan Carlos Amorós has perhaps his biggest puzzle yet ahead of him this week—we’ll see how he chooses to play this one.

Bay FC currently sit just below Gotham in standings, with the same amount of wins, draws, and losses—goal differential is the only thing separating the two teams (4 vs. -2). Bay FC has a strong defensive line, with veteran defenders Abby Dahlkemper, Emily Menges, and Caprice Dydasco playing alongside exciting young talent Alyssa Malonson—however, Menges has been out for Bay’s last two matches with an excused absence, and if that continues, that could be a hole in the defense for Gotham to exploit. Bay also has a very young but talented midfield, and perhaps its biggest threat comes in the form of Racheal Kundananji and Asisat Oshoala up top (the two combined for the only goal scored against Gotham by Bay last season). 

Bay has strong talent across all lines and will definitely be a tough opponent to face, but hopefully Gotham can finish the first half of the season strong before heading into a month-long break from league play in July.

Also, for our New York City friends, don’t forget to vote in the 2025 primary election! Early voting is open now until Sunday, June 22 and election day is Tuesday, June 24. New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation found that former governor Andrew Cuomo had sexually harassed at least 11 women during his time in office—he has shown himself to have no respect for women (and this includes women in sports!) and this great city deserves better than his leadership. So remember,

Don’t

Rank

Evil

Andrew for

Mayor

Go Bats!

Thumbnail courtesy of Gotham FC.