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You might as well have taken the deep-dish pizza and Navy Pier away from Chicago. The Red Stars entered the game with no Julie Ertz, no Alyssa Naeher, no Casey Krueger, no Kealia Watt (and no Kealia Ohai, either). But I do think it was a great showing: 120 minutes, end-to-end soccer, good goals, excitement. There’s been a bunch of adversity on and off the field, and I think it’s necessary to make this league better. “Obviously, it’s been a very long year for every team for different reasons. It was a great turnout for both teams and the league in general,” Chicago midfielder Morgan Gautrat told Sporting News. For us, we had our fans here out loud, and so did they. “There was a great crowd, which was unbelievable. What happened Saturday should not distract from the enormity of what has transpired away from the field, but it did offer a sterling example of the league’s inherent value.
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It was one more NWSL blunder that had to be addressed, but at least this was handled when it became an issue. The Washington-Chicago game drew an appreciative crowd of 10,360 that ranks as the third-largest largest in the history of the NWSL Championship, remarkable given the game site was moved here only a month earlier, when players complained that playing in Portland meant they’d have to contest their biggest game of the season at 9 a.m. team competion to resume play following the COVID shutdown, and resolving its persistent television issues by signing with CBS Sports. These became the defining moments of the 2021 NWSL season, only a year after the league had triumphed by becoming the first U.S. He was “terminated for cause” nearly two months later, after an investigation into allegations of harrassment and a toxic work environment had been reported by the Washington Post.Ī few days after Burke was dismissed, the Carolina Courage fired coach Paul Riley following reports in The Athletic that some of his former players accused him of sexual coercion. Their coach at the start of the season, Richie Burke, stepped down in August for what were termed “medical reasons” and reassigned to the front office. It has been that sort of year for the NWSL in general and for the Spirit in particular. There were almost none, honestly, that were on the order of, “Go team.” There were multiple signs in the South end zone demanding Spirit owner Steve Baldwin sell the team, others that expressed support for the league’s players association. We kind of just went into playoff mode after we were given those forfeits - because we had to. Besides the forfeits, we haven’t lost since August, which is pretty incredible. “What’s happened, we can’t change … The only thing we had control over was how we responded and what we did with the last games we had in the season. It was our ability to persevere,” O’Hara said. “I don’t think it was just me I think it was the whole group.
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That includes the nature of the only two Spirit defeats in three months under interim coach Kris Ward: forfeits necessitated because the team was charged with violating the league’s COVID-19 protocols. Though it demanded the players involved be skilled, dynamic, tough, fierce, indefatigable and - perhaps more than anything - resilient, the triumph of these amazing women and their admirable qualities over the team’s often dreadful circumstance is something no one should want to see repeated. This is a both an acknowledgement of the Spirit as a team and a reproach of what their organization has allowed them to endure. This is the most remarkable championship in the history of American sports.
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This is Washington’s fourth major team-sport championship since 2018, but it was entirely different from the Capitals winning the Stanley Cup or the Mystics and Nationals following a year later with WNBA and World Series titles, respectively. You have no idea what we’ve all gone through.” “I honestly quite can’t describe it, because of everything we’ve been through and the fact that we’re ending it as NWSL champions,” O’Hara told reporters afterward.