North Carolina Courage look for clear skies after weather-delayed stretch
Players, coach advocate for player safety in such scenarios.
It’s been an eventful week and a half for the North Carolina Courage.
Two road games the past two weekends, with two extensive weather delays in the middle of those games. The first one, April 22 at Red Bull Arena against Gotham FC, went to a delay of about two hours at halftime due to lightning in the area. The score was 0-0 at the time, and there seemed to be genuine deliberations and uncertainty if the wait would stretch indefinitely.
“We were one lightning strike away from the game being done,” Courage head coach Sean Nahas told Soccermusings after training last Thursday. “The players didn't want to play past a certain point. I mean, we talked, it was game three of a three-game week. And it's like at some point, you have to look at the health and safety. And both clubs were great and working together to come to an agreement and then we were at the final hour and the skies cleared out. But it was a long [delay].”
The fortunes didn’t favor the Courage on the field after the restart, as a gritty draw turned into a 1-0 win for Gotham, courtesy of a goal in the 80th minute scored by former North Carolina forward Lynn Williams.
It’s North America, and we’re in thunderstorm season. It’s a fact of life in the soccer world, and nearly every team is affected from time to time. Learn your lessons and onto the next one, right?
Well, it was deja vu of a sort in the very next game, although the game state was different this time. On Friday, the Courage faced the Houston Dash in Texas, and after a lively first half that produced a 1-0 lead thanks to Tyler Lussi’s first goal for North Carolina, the teams played the first several minutes of the second half before lightning halted the proceedings once more. This time, the delay dragged to three hours, and there was a last-gasp attempt to restart at 11:56 pm local time, only for the players’ warm-ups to be interrupted by — you guessed it — lightning. The NWSL announced the game was complete and would be a 1-0 win for the Courage.
But frustration with the uncertainty persisted. Courage captain Denise O’Sullivan tweeted, “Player welfare yet again been overlooked. We gotta be better” the next day.
As the Courage get another double-game week, starting with a match against Gotham FC at WakeMed Soccer Stadium in the Challenge Cup on Wednesday, Nahas said that the lighter minutes on the players’ legs from Houston was essentially cancelled out by the length and stress of the delay.
“Friday was really tough for them. Even even though we only played 50-something minutes we were at the stadium and most of our players didn't get to bed till after two in the morning,” Nahas said during Monday’s Courage press conference. “Some fell asleep in the three-hour break that we had. It wasn't a good situation. Just in terms of the delay. It's no one's fault.”
While some observers wondered why the NWSL didn’t try to play the rest of the Dash-Courage game on Sunday or at a later date, as generally happens in MLS in such situations — the likely answer being less funding and ability to pay for sudden travel changes at the NWSL level at present — Nahas did appeal for more specifics on the league’s side in such situations. Again, thunderstorms aren’t unusual, so the apparent ad hoc nature of decisions being made seems puzzling.
“I would have liked a little bit more guidance and where we were going, but it is what it is,” Nahas noted.
At the same time, the Courage may have been hit by some odd luck lately in terms of game interruptions, but North Carolina’s manager gave a thought to the scheduling more generally and how difficult the upcoming game could be for the opponent.
“If we thought our [schedule] was difficult Gotham's is even more difficult,” he said. “They played yesterday and they traveled today and now they have one day between [games]. I think that's absurd in there for them, too. It's just a disservice.”
How can teams better weather (no pun intended) such jam-packed and unsettled stretches? Nahas wishes NWSL rosters were bigger.
“If there's one thing that I wish they would have changed it’s maybe the extension of the rosters. Maybe it's not 26 [players], maybe it's 28 and it's 30 during these times so that you can have more players on the roster so that you can take care of them. Otherwise, you're gonna have players playing all the time,” Nahas said.