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Eighty-eight minutes into the Portland Thorns’ match against the Orlando Pride last weekend, the broadcast cut to Caiya Hanks’ family in the stands, pumping their fists and cheering. The match was level at 1–1 and Hanks, in her sophomore year in the NWSL, was taking the field for the first time in 14 months, after tearing her ACL in a game last year.
Rising star Pietra Tordin, who was coming out of the match, pulled Hanks in for a hug and patted the back of her head. “You got this,” Hanks recalls Tordin saying. “You know who you are, and you can just be yourself, and you can do it.”
She did.
In the dying minutes of the match, Thorns defender M.A. Vignola won a duel with Orlando’s Summer Yates and played the ball ahead to Hanks, who was running toward the Pride’s box. Hanks took two touches to the center of the pitch and ripped a shot past Pride goalkeeper Anna Moorhouse.
It was a good moment for a miracle. Indeed, the past two games have felt like must-wins for the Thorns, who entered an Aug. 9 match in Boston on their longest winless streak of the year and coming off a 5–1 loss to the Utah Royals on Aug. 2. It was their most lopsided defeat not only of this season, but since October 2023.
Put another way: Joe Biden was still favored to win a second term the last time Portland got thumped that hard. The club dropped down to sixth place in the NWSL table, its worst position since the league’s first week of play (when standings were based on a single match performance). To make matters worse, the Utah game was star midfielder Olivia Moultrie’s last of the season; she tore her anterior cruciate ligament while training the following week.
Portland head coach Robert Vilahamn was aware of the stakes heading into Boston.
“I need to make sure we are very good to come back from this,” he said after Utah. “I need to learn quickly because otherwise we’re going to drop lower in the table.”
Sixth out of 16 teams really isn’t the worst position to be in, especially in a league where the top eight clubs make it to the postseason and Portland still has a third of their schedule left to play. But taken hand in hand with the results since the league resumed from break (one win, one draw and three losses up to that point), Vilahamn and his coaching staff were right to feel pressure.
“We are a young team,” Thorns assistant coach Sarah Lowdon said after Portland’s eventual 4–3 victory over the Boston Legacy, “and so we are going to have times where we maybe are a little bit inconsistent. It’s just making sure that we learn from those mistakes—and learn from the good things, too.”
The Thorns are still a relatively young squad, and they’re playing under a first-year head coach.
Both those things necessitate some ups and downs—especially in a 30-game regular season. But earlier in the year, Portland was still finding a way to get results.
So what have the Thorns learned from their worst stretch of the season?
“We have to tip our hat to the teams that are punishing us and scoring goals and getting points off of us,” defender and captain Sam Hiatt said after the Utah loss. “But at the same time, a lot of the issues we cause ourselves.”
Specifically, the vast majority of those goals come from Portland allowing their opponents space in wide areas. The Thorns have either found themselves punished by a cross to a run they’re not tracking in the box or the mythical “shross”—a ball that looks like a cross but ends up a shot that finds its way into the back of the net.
For Hiatt, there are two sides to conceding goals off her and her team’s own missteps. On one hand, it’s frustrating to hand opportunities to an opponent who can capitalize on them. (“Every team can and will punish you if you give them the opportunity,” she said, “especially in the box.”)
“But on the flipside,” she said, “we should be able to fix those moments. Those are things that are within our control.”
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been an easy correction for the Thorns. They’ve conceded goals off individual mistakes, and they’ve missed chances to level the score from a losing position. They haven’t quite figured out their defending in the goal box: who’s stepping up to an opponent with the ball, who’s dropping back to cover the space the player stepping up has left behind, who’s tracking the other attacking runs. It’s a team effort.
Some of that is up to the players on the pitch: who is and isn’t there and how they’re still building toward the style of play that Vilahamn envisions. The multiweek loss of Reilyn Turner to a knee injury has proved a huge blow for the Thorns; after transferring Canadian international Mimi Alidou to Montreal and with Morgan Weaver—and now, Hanks—still working her way back into fitness, they don’t have another easy answer for a winger to take her place. Vilahamn and Lowdon rotated through three different backup options (defenders Marie Müller and Mallie McKenzie, along with midfielder Renee Lyles), but none quite filled all the areas required of that position.
Turner is expected to be available to play “very soon,” Lowdon said after the Orlando match. And Hanks looked to be a player who could very well challenge Turner for her starting role (or force the club to move Pietra Tordin into an attacking central midfield position) once Hanks can play a full 90 minutes.
Recent signing Nina Nijstad fills the midfield balance issue, but she’s appeared in all of four games. She’s figuring it out fast, but she’s still adjusting to the pace and physicality of the NWSL—and to playing alongside her new teammates.
And defensively, it feels like they’re still working out their organization and how not to get caught out when one player gets beat. (The lack of speed in the backline definitely isn’t helping with the latter part.)
If there’s a positive to take out of Portland’s struggles, it’s that no one seems to be shying away from responsibility—least of all Vilahamn.
“All the players we have in this team can defend, and they are good at it,” he said after the Utah loss. “We just need to make sure we can find a good way to improve that. That’s my job, and I need to be accountable for that.”
Vilahamn had to take a step back from doing as much this past week—he received a red card for a nifty little touch on the ball from his position on the sidelines against Boston—but his first assistant, Lowdon, hasn’t hesitated to step up to the plate.
The Orlando match wasn’t perfect, but the Thorns managed the attacking threat of Barbra Banda and have found a way to take 6 points out of their past two games. Now sitting at fourth in the NWSL standings, Portland clearly has room to grow in this last third of the season.
But I’m certainly not counting them out.
NEXT MATCH:
VS. DENVER SUMMIT
5:45 pm Saturday, Aug. 22
Providence Park
