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Kevin Kaduk
CHGO Head of Content

Pugh has shaken off whatever cobwebs remained from her time away with the USWNT this summer, and has scored four goals and notched three assists in three games. Her performance on Wednesday against the league-leading Kansas City Current might have been her magnum opus.

For a long time, Pugh has been described as a speedy striker, someone who can torch backlines and create advantageous moments in isolation. It’s true that her natural speed with the ball at her feet is one of the best in the world—she’s arguably faster with the ball at her feet than without it.

But she’s not the only player in the NWSL with an impressive peak speed at a sprint, and those tools frequently aren’t enough to make a player undroppable at both the club and international level. Pugh took a big step forward last year in her ability to get into dangerous spaces, but this year she’s become Neo entering the Matrix in manipulating that space around her.

Vision

Mal Pugh sees things on a soccer field that other players don’t always see. She’s aware of spaces opening up in front of her, and areas with which to run into to receive the ball. She’s also perhaps underrated in her evaluation of dead ball situations (her penalty kick record notwithstanding.)

All three of her assists in the last three games have come from either corner kicks or free kicks, and the ability to punch in set piece goals has been crucial for Chicago to overcome their scoring struggles.

The way a soccer game slows down for Pugh can sometimes come at a detriment, when her teammates aren’t on the same page, but rather than it coming from an inordinate amount of offside calls (like the ones Sam Kerr racked up in her last year with the team), she sometimes finds herself alone in situations where she needs help.

She still has the on-ball ability to manipulate situations even when she’s at a numerical disadvantage, frequently decelerating and finding one of her defensive midfielders to maintain possession. What that means is that her acceleration is always a deliberate choice, and not a default mode of operating.

Let’s look at her first goal on Wednesday, a 90-yard run and dribble barnburner that included two soft-touch nutmegs and a rounding of the goalkeeper. It should be a Puskas award nominee.

Kansas City had opened up in transition, pushing for an equalizer after giving up an early goal on yet another corner kick chance generated by Pugh’s dead ball ability. Zoe Morse clears the ball to Pugh, who anticipates the pressure of defender Kristen Edmonds behind her. Pugh deftly pushes the ball between Edmonds’s legs, and suddenly the whole field opened up in front of her.

The first nutmeg was essential to creating the space Pugh needed to run, but the second was another example of how when Elizabeth Ball came in to close down space, Chicago’s MVP candidate was thinking at another speed.

Kansas City keeper Cassie Miller made an attempt at the ball, but Pugh shifted the ball over to her left foot (which she’s doing with more regularity) to slot the goal home.

Acceleration

Now, not to say that Pugh’s speed isn’t a key factor to her ability to win footraces, but the timing of her acceleration is what gave her a chance on her second tally of the night.

Ella Stevens was battling with two Kansas City players for possession, which left the ball briefly unclaimed just past the halfway line. Pugh then swooped in like a free-safety ready to convert a pick-six, going from a jog to top speed in a matter of seconds.

The rest of the sequence was just a classic Pugh goal, where the striker cut inside to put the ball on her right foot at the top of the box, and getting the right shot off immediately before Kansas City’s central defenders could collapse in on the available space

Pugh’s ability to put on the burners is important, but she becomes unstoppable when she pairs her abilities with that sense of visionary calm that not only helps a player make a key interception, but slot the ball in before the opportunity disappears

A little bit of help

While Pugh did the lion’s share of the work, neither of these goals happen without Ella Stevens beside her. Sometimes at a glance it can look like Pugh goes solo too often, or even on the first goal she missed a pass to Stevens inside.

But I’m not sure when Pugh calls her own number she’s necessarily wrong. She is the key attacking generator for the team, and she’s finishing these chances more often than not. But without Stevens’s commitment to making the run with her, Miller has an easier decision to make to cut Pugh’s angle off in the final motion before the strike. She has to worry about Stevens on the other side, which gives Pugh the space to complete the unlikely.

Similarly with the second goal, Stevens is holding her own against half the Kansas City midfield, giving Pugh just enough time to swoop in and carry the ball towards the Current’s box. Chris Petrucelli said last weekend that Stevens has been earning her starts in training, and by all accounts she deserves to stay in the starting XI in the way she’s doing all the little things right to get Chicago’s attack flowing again.

As the Red Stars maneuver through their treacherous end to the regular season, Pugh’s playmaking, and her teammates’ commitment to help, is turning into goals. They’ve done almost just enough to ensure a playoff spot. No time to take the foot off the gas now.

Chicago remains adamant they’re taking this stretch one game at a time, with an expectation that steady performances will get them where they want to be by the end of the regular season. But they have a treacherous final five games against playoff contenders, and they haven’t defeated a team above the playoff line since June.

In some ways, it feels like this season has contained two versions of the Chicago Red Stars, and which one wins out will be determined by the way the season ends. The question remains: are playoffs the expectation for the club, and therefore dropping out counts as failure? Or has the team exceeded this year’s expectations, for which a playoff berth would merely be a stepping stone towards the future?

The argument for playoffs as a stepping stone

There’s no doubt that Chicago’s availability report has been a huge hindrance over the arc of the regular season, and the full-team commitment in the face of adversity by players who weren’t expecting this much responsibility is going to pay dividends for years to come.

The development of Zoe Morse as a center-back anchor has been monumental to the team’s success, as has Tatumn Milazzo’s step forward as a 1v1 defender. Rookies Amanda Kowalski, Jill Aguilera, Sarah Griffith, and Ava Cook have shown their tenacity at the professional level, in ways that will only grow into the next year. Sarah Luebbert has had to slot into the team in a variety of roles by necessity, but in the weeks she’s gotten consistent time working within the attack she’s shown exactly how she can stretch defenses on the dribble. Sami Fisher and Ella Stevens have both had nice moments off the bench, as they figure out their best places on the field.

The team should also feel good about their stars that have stepped up this season, especially Mallory Pugh and Bianca St-Georges. Pugh has backed up every bit of hype generated by her signing prior to the 2021 season, and at the age of 24 she is the kind of player you build around for the long-term. When Pugh is locked in, she can carry the team anywhere, both in scoring goals and in finding teammates. St-Georges, 25, has also proven to be an incredibly important piece of the attack when she’s given enough playing time to build chemistry with her teammates.

There’s also an evergreen feeling to the way Vanessa DiBernardo and Danny Colaprico have been playing this season, in a new defensive partnership that nonetheless feels lived-in. Alyssa Naeher also shows no signs of slowing down as she solidified her place as the USWNT No.1 goalkeeper this summer.

It’s also worth looking at the players Chicago is hoping to get back in the offseason. Tierna Davidson is under contract for 2023, and her presence will radically change the stability of the defense, in an equal and opposite impact as her absence. The return of Casey Krueger will ask questions of the team’s formation, but imagining the same system with Davidson and Krueger should also get fans excited about next year. The return of Sarah Woldmoe (alongside the return from injury from Morgan Gautrat) would change the dynamics of the team’s spine in positive ways, as the return of Kealia Watt would to the attack.

No one wants to go into an NWSL season making an argument that you’re here to develop your depth due to absences, or work at a disadvantage due to the removal of an entrenched head coach with way too much power. But if the Red Stars were set up to sink, they’ve swum this whole year, and deserve to be rewarded with a place in the top six.

The argument that the window is further closing

We discussed this topic multiple times last year, when Chicago once again came as close as possible to winning a title without actually getting over the line: Will the Red Stars veterans ever get the trophy they deserve? And when has the window closed?

When Tatumn Milazzo had to exit Chicago’s 4-0 demolition at the hands of the North Carolina Courage in August, Bianca St-Georges had to step in to play in the three-back despite not naturally being a central defender. Milazzo was able to bounce back and play against Racing Louisville the following week, but the team’s roster tightrope has never felt so thin.

That sort of “making it work” rotation has been the Red Stars’ mode of operation all year, but it also speaks to the situation players have to navigate due to front office inactivity. Chicago replaced Davidson with Kowalski on a rookie contract, and did not make any moves to further shore up the defense after the loss of Kayla Sharples to an ACL injury. The team also did not come away from the secondary transfer market with any extra attacking talent to pair with Pugh to solve woes at the other end.

The availability report comes into play here as well, but if roster overhead means that the Red Stars can’t make moves to win it all, one has to wonder if that moment will ever come with the veterans that got them here. Because the main driver towards Chicago’s reluctance to move for final pieces could be coming from the same source as in many years past: existing contracts.

The NWSL has entered into its new free agency era, and suddenly the Red Stars are going to also have to compete for a number of players that they already have on their roster. Danny Colaprico, Vanessa DiBernardo, Morgan Gautrat, Rachel Hill, Yuki Nagasato, Kealia Watt, and Arin Wright are all eligible to immediately enter free agency under the new terms of the collective bargaining agreement, according to the NWSLPA.

There’s been some conflict already between the NWSL and the Players Association as to whether players with a contract option are eligible for free agency, and that affects the Red Stars too. Colaprico, DiBernardo, Gautrat, Hill, and Wright all have team options extending into 2023, meaning Chicago could choose to extend them for one more year. Teams contend that those options block a player from entering free agency right away; the union says since those options give teams all of the power and were negotiated before the collective bargaining agreement, and therefore should not be counted as a contractual obligation.

Chicago has made moves to get out from under expensive contracts before, perhaps most notably when sending Nagasato to Louisville prior to the 2021 season (whether she returned at a lower salary is unknown). They also have cited the signings of their formerly national team allocated players as factors in the Red Stars’ slow offseason last year—Alyssa Naeher, Krueger, Pugh, and Davidson are all under contract until 2023.

There’s no reason to think free agents are eager to jump ship after this season, but the core itself got smaller last offseason due to requested trades. This time, veteran players don’t actually have to ask. And the unexpected retirement of Alyssa Mautz only underlined that players the Red Stars have relied on so heavily this season don’t have forever to spend in the trenches.

No matter what, the Red Stars are still alive, and will need to implement every lesson learned to make a push towards the final goal. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned about this team this season, it’s that they’re not just happy to show up: they want to win.

Much has been made this year of the rookie presence on the team, especially as established players move on and off the availability report—it was an indicator of just how dire things have become in the palpable relief in getting a glimpse of Morgan Gautrat on the bench on Saturday, in a welcome sign in her long calf injury recovery.

But if the club does finish the season above the playoff line, it will be due to the veterans steering the group with a steady hand.

“I think the team handled themselves very well, there was no panic. Alyssa [Naeher] told me we were going to be okay, so when she said that I felt a lot better,” head coach Chris Petrucelli said after the match.

While there was some levity to that statement, it does speak to the unique position the Red Stars are in when a brand new head coach, and many players handling serious responsibilities for the first time. The Red Stars have made the playoffs six straight times, and the importance of the voices from players who actually contributed to those steady performances has been reflected in the level of buy-in the team has continued to show even when results are not going their way.

“It was just about hitting reset a little bit this week, not getting focused and caught up on obviously, we were in a little bit of a skid,” Naeher said. “But we’ve been in this league long enough to know that everything is a bit streaky, you’ve got highs and lows and winning streaks and losing streaks.”

Naeher is speaking from experience, specifically as a member of the 2019 Red Stars who only operated in winning or losing streaks, and she has her history with the squad on her side as she keeps the defense focused. A few weeks prior to her recent ankle injury, Arin Wright had echoed a similar sentiment, “Anyone who’s watched this league, this league is wild. And in eight years I’ve been here, I mean, you guys have probably seen where we sit in the table. And somehow we find our way to these final matches.”

The Red Stars didn’t entirely solve all of their problems on Saturday, but the win over Louisville does at least remind everyone of the danger they can present at their best. Pugh had possibly one of the best NWSL performances of her career, in a two goal, two assist exercise in domination that threw her right back into the MVP conversation.

To balance some of the praise, it has to be acknowledged that Chicago got more space from Louisville’s backline than they’d seen in weeks, which says as much about Racing’s ills as the Red Stars’ reset. But there’s no doubt that when they saw the space in front of them, Chicago took it in spades.

Bianca St-Georges’s long diagonal assist to Pugh to start the scoring was her best-placed ball of the season, and Pugh’s first touch on the outside of her right foot to set up her scoring position was world class. For Nagasato’s two set-piece tallies, Pugh opted for hard service, first whipped in at Nagasato’s head and then low and driven for a slick touch to put the Red Stars up 3-0. “I think that anytime you walk away from a loss like [last weekend’s], I think that you have to internally reflect and I think as a group we did that,” Pugh said.

When Chicago’s playmakers are executing that well, they’re going to be difficult to stop. It takes an immense amount of pressure off of the make-shift three-back to open the scoring first, and while Alyssa Naeher had to make a few big stops, they were mostly from shooting positions the team was comfortable giving up. Seven of Racing’s 11 total shots were from outside the 18-yard box, including both of their two shots on target.

Tatumn Milazzo and Zoe Morse were both called into 1v1 situations, especially when Louisville super-sub Jessica McDonald came off the bench in the second half, and despite a few moments of chaos in the box, both came up big. After letting four goals in last week, getting a clean sheet speaks to a level of focus that’s easy to lose this far into the season.

“To have those be the opportunities that we’re giving up that speaks to the commitment of the back-three, the commitment to the No. 6’s to defend, and kind of forced [Louisville] to take those opportunities,” Naeher said.

No matter what the final outcome of the year becomes, what we are seeing now is a more definitive arc to how Chicago has remained competitive despite front office upheaval and absences that should have sunk the season. Veterans are holding a high standard, while still taking things one day at a time, and less seasoned players have never let their faith waver.

“Those guys are pretty tough.” Petrucelli said. “I don’t know, Vanessa [DiBernardo] and Danny [Colaprico], they’ve hardly ever come off the field. And watch the game, they don’t look too tired to me. They look pretty good.”

While some teams are already looking toward rebuilds in 2023, Chicago’s veterans aren’t letting the season slip away just yet. There’s urgency within this core group that has been in this position so many times, and it’s helping the Red Stars hold on.

The club was dealt more bad availability report news prior to kickoff, with Mallory Pugh out with knee inflammation, alongside a myriad of injuries and absences that have befallen the Red Stars. Chelsie Dawber is still out with a hamstring injury, Morgan Gautrat’s calf issue is still plaguing her, and while you eventually gloss over the season-ending injuries and returns from pregnancy, those absences have been reflected in the Red Stars losing steam.

Last week’s victory over a woeful Gotham team aside, Chicago has done just enough to remain competitive in the last month, with a new bashfulness in front of goal that sets the game state up to punish you. I’m reminded of the Red Stars we saw in the early months of 2021, when mistakes in the back killed the momentum and chances weren’t converting into goals.

Angel City’s lone goal came off another slip-up by the Red Stars three-back, which has been a recurring frustration in its own right in recent weeks. I praised Chicago’s positioning in last week’s article, and it was once again disciplined in Los Angeles, but errant passing in front of goal broke the game open. Not to say that Angel City didn’t create other chances, but the Red Stars’ ability to snuff those chances out rest on the ability to stay composed for 90 minutes.

What should be more concerning as the team awaits Pugh’s return is not that they are underperforming their attacking stats, it’s that they’re scoring at almost the exact same rate as the chances they’re creating. Chicago’s accumulated xG over 15 games is 20.89, while their xG against sits at 17.19. In reality, they’ve scored 22 goals and conceded 18, with a +4 goal differential that all but matches their xG-xgA of 3.69. So when the team struggles to put one away against San Diego despite being up a player, or fall to Angel City on the road, it’s not so much that they’ve been unlucky. It’s that they’re not generating enough opportunities to create their own luck.

Chicago’s attacking ills were in full force on Sunday, encapsulating a new shadow of disconnect that has hung over their midseason.

“We got a ball into dangerous spaces a little, like wide of the box, let’s say, but deep,” Chris Petrucelli said after the match. “And we could not connect, playing into the box or even as we dribbled into the box, and then tried to play the next pass, we just couldn’t connect.”

When asked about that lack of connectivity, and what it’s going to take to turn things around, Petrucelli emphasized quality over quantity. “We got the ball into the box, but wide, but we didn’t connect. The quality of the pass wasn’t great, and then when it was maybe the quality of the touch, the first touch wasn’t great. And then if that worked, the quality of the shot wasn’t great.”

Chicago started a number of young players again this week, but they’re also relying on that arc of development that seems to have hit something of a rut in recent weeks. Arin Wright has done a nice job calming the backline down, but she couldn’t influence the play in which Angel City scored on Sunday, and the team acknowledged what they give up by playing her at center-back by pushing her forward as they searched for an equalizer. Sarah Griffith came in as a late sub, when she appears primed for more responsibility. Ava Cook is still determining the right runs to make to be a distributive outlet in the attack, with Pugh on or off the pitch, and St-Georges is still looking for her touch back that she showcased early in the year.

The team was riding high after exceeding early expectations, but this influx point feels like another good example of how it’s still unclear what the team needs to get out of this season. The availability report has been brutal, in a way that raises eyebrows every week. The team has not been aggressive in the transfer market to actually shore up many of those absences, with the responsibility of figuring things out falling on the current group. That group works well within the system provided, but mental fatigue is a real element at this point in the year, and many players have not had to play this much in their professional careers.

At this point in the season, Petrucelli isn’t overemphasizing absences.

“We put 11 good players on the field today, and the expectations are the same for them,” he said. He’s right, and it’s an important ethos in the locker room. But Chicago’s reluctance in front of goal speaks perhaps to a run of results beginning to turn into a mental block, and they’re not going to have a ton of time to adjust before their next trip out of the city.

The Red Stars take on the North Carolina Courage on Saturday, August 20 at 6pm CT.

The Red Stars won every major stat in the 2-0 win, from passes attempted, passing accuracy, tackles, shots, and shots on goal (of which Gotham did not register even one.) Chicago still struggled to finish their chances created, with both of their goals punched in on set pieces, but the match reflected the kind of standard the Red Stars have held themselves to this year.

That concept of steady, plugged-in performances has become Chicago’s calling card, and it’s not shocking their discipline and calm showed through against a Gotham team adrift at sea. Arin Wright, who has slotted in well to the established Red Stars three-back in recent weeks, encapsulated the process well this week, saying “I feel like that’s kind of the motto of the team this year. Everyone’s just kind of taking things in stride, plugging and when they need to.”

The buy-in squad-wide has been notable, even as the team struggled through a brief two-game losing streak. Looking at the team’s passing maps in both of those losses, not a lot changed, nor did the shape look pulled out too significantly.

Against the Houston Dash, despite a rough 4-1 loss off an Ebony Salmon hat-trick, Chicago’s intention in their passing methods remained clear. The team passed heavily through defensive midfielder Danny Colaprico, with Yuki Nagasato sitting behind Vanessa DiBernardo. The team’s attack couldn’t connect as well as they usually do with Mallory Pugh on the field, but its possession numbers remained strong.

What the passing map here misses are the turnovers, punished by Salmon, that led to the lopsided scoreline, but the commitment to methodical build-up reflects confidence in the process. Ava Cook fell back into the midfield at times to receive the ball, with Sarah Luebbert averaging the most advanced position on the field for the Red Stars, which also reflects the efficiency issues the team has had in recent weeks.

Against San Diego, Chicago advanced the ball quicker, spending more time in their opponent’s half. The game state influenced this one heavily, with the Wave again pouncing on a mistake in the back to pull ahead, and then sitting with most of their players behind the ball after going down to ten on an Abby Dahlkemper red card.

Here, Pugh arrives back as the clear focal point, with the center-backs stretching to provide quick service. This time, Nagasato posted up in front of the established defensive midfield partnership of DiBernardo and Colaprico, with the shape in defensive transition looking remarkably similar as the week before. However, Cook again drops back behind Pugh to receive service, which has become a theme.

The nature of passing maps over 90 minutes means that some players are going to have averaged out positions that don’t always reflect exactly how they played the game. Pugh, for example, is frequently a data-breaker by way of drifting towards either flank, which gives her a more central average position on the field at the game’s end. However, the relationship of Pugh to Cook should give the team some pause as they try to get their goal-scoring boots back on in the run of play.

They’ll get more time to gel in the next few weeks, but Cook sometimes finds herself reacting to Pugh’s freedom and pace by filling in spaces behind her, when she would be better served as a forward passing outlet. Against Gotham, Luebbert filled that role on the flank from the wingback position, and Nagasato pushed about as far forward as she has been all season.

Chicago’s formation against NJNY shows just how far forward the Red Stars felt comfortable sitting, as Gotham sat in to try to stop the bleeding (and almost succeeded, with Chicago only getting a breakthrough courtesy of Tatumn Milazzo in first-half stoppage time.) It also shows some of the creative freedom being given to the group to try to foster higher efficiency shooting.

Nagasato finished the match in a more advanced position than Cook, which feels like solving one problem while creating another. Chicago’s 3-2-4-1 is meant to leave one central striker to facilitate and finish, and that feels like the greatest work in progress as the team goes through their final eight games of the season.

But if there’s a main takeaway from the last few weeks, it’s that Chicago’s system can withstand adversity, no matter what players are called upon to execute it. These principles have allowed the Red Stars to remain a stone’s throw away from the top of the table despite overwhelming absences.

The Red Stars haven’t been perfect, but they understand that their greatest strengths are keeping their heads, slowing things down, and not making mistakes. They’re about to go on a four-game road trip, and the system will be tested again. They appear ready for the challenge.

“We’re much better when the game has calmed down and, and we’re in our structure and possessing the ball and things like that,” head coach Chris Petrucelli said this week. “If it gets end to end, and crazy NWSL-style things are happening, that’s probably not the best game for us to play. So it really does come on us to settle the game.”

But when captain and eight-year veteran of the team Vanessa DiBernardo was asked after Chicago’s 1-0 loss to the San Diego Wave at Soldier Field to say what 10-year veteran Alyssa Mautz—retiring after the match—has meant to her as a teammate, she began with “I’m going to get emotional. I’m not sure if I can.”

What followed was an outpouring, with both players crying and laughing at the same time. Mautz chimed in as DiBernardo composed herself, with tears in her own eyes, “We’ve been through a lot.”

Especially after a closely-fought match, a player never knows when they’re going to be hit with a wave of emotion, and the postgame presser’s significance was likely influenced by just how quickly Mautz’s departure became a reality. Mautz said she hadn’t been actively looking for other opportunities, and she was getting minutes as a substitute wingback in Chicago’s new system, but a call one day from alma mater Texas A&M presented an opportunity she couldn’t turn down.

“They just kind of called me out of the blue, I never was searching for anything,” she said after the game. “It was just the right time I guess to start thinking about it. I never thought I would retire in the middle of the season. It kills me a little bit.”

To say Mautz has been with the Red Stars since the beginning almost understates exactly what a presence she’s become not only to the team but to the colleagues she’s worked with every day for the last ten years. Her entry into the NWSL wasn’t as heralded as some others—she re-joined Chicago after playing with them in the WPSL Elite, but she wasn’t picked up by the team until the fifth round of the 2013 Supplemental Draft. She scored 16 goals in 143 appearances, mostly in the heyday of the Christen Press era from 2014 to 2018. Mautz also spent some time in the Australian W-league, playing for both the Perth Glory and Adelaide United.

Within her biography is a story of resilience and a love of both her teammates and the game of soccer. She only got one season in Women’s Professional Soccer, playing for Sky Blue FC, before that league folded. She then turned to the Red Stars and the WPSL, and Chicago has remained the closest professional team to her hometown of St. Louis.

She played across the globe, both in her time in Australia but also with a brief stint in Russia, which she told The Equalizer in 2019 that she did not enjoy very much. She coached privately, and even took nannying jobs to keep her professional soccer career alive. On Saturday, she was one of only three non-national team capped players still in the league, alongside Lauren Barnes and Tori Huster. That number is now down to two.

She found a home with the Red Stars, and said on Saturday there’s no other club she ever wanted to play for, but then adversity hit in a different way. Mautz suffered two back to back ACL tears in 2019 and 2020, sidelining her for the team’s run to the 2019 NWSL Championship, and the entirety of the 2020 Challenge Cup. In 2021, her mom passed away, and she said that her return to the field afterward was hard. Her influence on the field became more limited as she dealt with injury, but her presence in the locker room was essential.

She said on Saturday that the first moment that springs to mind as her favorite game as a Red Star came during that period, when she watched the team win the first NWSL semifinal in their history in 2019. “That crowd, it gave me goosebumps, just to see that and the fans get so into it. It was incredible,” she said. “And I was just so happy for my teammates to finally get over that hump.” Mautz is known both within the team and across the league for her competitive spirit, and her willingness to do whatever was necessary to help the team.

Her greatest memory being a match she couldn’t play in probably best encapsulates her role as a supporter, fierce competitor, and friend for many of the other players she’s worked with over the years. “Mautz is like the definition of a Red Star. She’s gone through so much, yet she still has the back of everyone else,” said DiBernardo. “Everything that she brings on the field is that hard work, that dedication, that grittiness to win every ball that is contagious and infectious, and it’s just like, the energy that she brings is something that we will truly miss here.”

DiBernardo used the word we, but one has to wonder if there’s also a little bit of I in that statement as well. The Red Stars are changing out of necessity, but Mautz was the last Red Star left that would have been at training when DiBernardo walked in on her first day as a rookie in 2014. Someday, sooner than when she began, DiBernardo will be sitting center at the press conference table herself, while the next Red Star tries to sum her own legacy up. Such is the nature of sports, and is a credit to both players’ longevity.

But it also speaks to some of the idiosyncrasies of women’s sports that 10 years with Alyssa Mautz still doesn’t feel like quite enough time, and what being there from the beginning really means in terms of professional standards and recognition. The Red Stars were guests at Soldier Field on the weekend, in a very successful doubleheader that nonetheless had the club scrambling to honor someone who meant so much to the locker room.

“I told the team before the game they weren’t playing for Mautz, we wanted to play like Mautz,” said head coach Chris Petrucelli, who only got to work with the veteran for part of a season. “… This was very quick for us, and we also don’t get to control a lot of things here at Soldier Field, so maybe we didn’t quite have enough ceremony for her.”

But if Mautz didn’t get the win this weekend, or a crowd of 23,000 fans chanting her name, perhaps the best send-off was the one from DiBernardo in a media room, under field level, speaking honestly about a teammate and friend: “She has been the legacy of what a Red Star is, and I’m so excited for her and her next opportunity, but she’s going to be truly, truly missed here.”

On Saturday, the Chicago Red Stars will play inside the city of Chicago for the first time in the club’s NWSL history. Despite being a stalwart in the Chicagoland area for over 10 years, and drawing from the area’s depth of suburban talent throughout their history, the Red Stars finally get to live up to the Chicago part of their name in earnest.

Saturday will likewise mark the first opportunity for homegrown players like Vanessa DiBernardo, Sarah Griffith, Amanda Kowalski, and Tatumn Milazzo to play within city limits, hopefully in front of the largest crowd of the season. And while the game is just a one-off doubleheader with the Fire, their first since 2019, it does warrant some reflection both on the history and relationship the Red Stars have with the city they represent.

Before Saturday, the only Red Star from Chicagoland to play at Soldier Field was Naperville native Casey Krueger, who will miss Saturday’s match as she’s returning after the birth of her son. She started for the USWNT on the lakefront against South Korea on October 6 2019, Jill Ellis’s last game as the manager of the team. Krueger getting that opportunity was bittersweet, as it was a last-minute victory tour call-up for a major tournament that she was not asked to participate in.

It’s not worth relitigating the circumstances that led to Krueger’s snub in 2019, but her reward in the moment came in the opportunity to play at home, for real this time.

“It’s unbelievable to play in front of my friends and family, half a mile from my house,” Krueger said after that match.

But after that whirlwind moment, the Red Stars have remained an arm’s length away from the city itself.

Even before their move to SeatGeek Stadium (then Toyota Park) in 2016, the Red Stars used to play at Benedictine University on a turf field in Lisle. The western suburb is reachable by Metra, but the facilities didn’t meet the expectations of a professional team in a growing league, and a permanent move to Bridgeview became the only way forward.

As we all know, Bridgeview brings a lot to the gameday experience and the professionalism standards of the team itself, but it does not solve the location issue. It forces teams who call SeatGeek home to prioritize car owners, which is inherently going to limit both the size and demographics of your potential audience.

While the move to SeatGeek understandably bettered the experience for players—not least being able to consistently play on grass rather than punishing turf—the attendance payoff for the Chicagoland Red Stars has only come in spurts. In 2019, their attendance numbers proved mercurial, struggling to bring fans in while international stars were away in France. But in the wake of the USWNT’s World Cup win, amidst a surge in the sports popularity, Chicago drew over 13,000 fans to a pivotal win over the North Carolina Courage in August, and ended the season with season attendance averages that far outpaced previous years.

The pandemic in 2020 essentially ended that momentum, and the Red Stars have since struggled to get it back. Returns to Bridgeview were slow in 2021, as many fans who had their first women’s soccer experiences just two years ago were not returning as regular fans. Add in the roster and coaching staff upheaval in the 2022 offseason, with reporting done that Chicago wasn’t always the beacon of progress the team set themselves up to be publicly, and 2022 has been more of a mixed bag.

Now the primary tenant at SeatGeek, the Red Stars have at least temporarily seceded the ability to be reachable without a car. Before the pandemic, certain PACE buses could take fans directly from Midway airport to the stadium, providing at least a stopgap compromise that allowed fans without a car to make the trek if they were feeling intrepid. The NWSL presence at SeatGeek is much clearer than when it was primarily an MLS venue, with Red Stars banners and game day activations, but the issues that caused the Fire to return to Soldier Field in the first place remain. Soccer’s foothold in Chicago has always been limited by what basically amounts to real estate deals, and it’s a problem that has not been solved.

With that in mind, it’s also been ironic to watch the Chicago Bears this week so clearly turn away from the very thing the city’s soccer teams have been dreaming of for a long time: A home in the city. Lori Lightfoot has done as much as she possibly could to keep the Bears within city limits, including a $2.2 billion proposal that would renovate the museum campus and put a dome over Soldier Field. Regardless, Chicago’s NFL team seems determined to move out to the suburbs themselves, where they can control everything from fan experience to new facilities. They’ve spent over a century as the kings of the city, and have still decided it’s more advantageous to see what the Chicagoland area has to offer.

It seems Soldier Field has become an imperfect vessel for any one purpose: it’s too old and small to compete with the modern American football stadium, it’s too cavernous for either soccer team to fill, and its location isn’t enough to overcome the difficulties presented by the facility itself. If the Bears do decide to bolt, one has to wonder if there isn’t an opportunity to finally create a soccer-specific footprint in Chicago, as the city’s sport.

It also speaks to who exactly these teams want to be, ultimately. Chicago prides itself on being a sports city, and the Red Stars will be the first team to espouse their pride in their Midwestern grit. But in their vision of a perfect future, Chicago’s teams don’t always want to exist in the actual city in which they’re housed. From Lightfoot’s proposed plans to the South Loop, to the mourning of the Wrigleyville Taco Bell, sports can be used to invest in a community, or to turn the city into a tourist attraction for suburban tourists. Many times the latter decision has been made instead.

The Red Stars have barely even begun to touch what they could be to the city if they were able and willing to engage with the community in a meaningful way. As for what they’re producing on the field, one also has to hope that the city of Chicago starts to take notice themselves. Because the Red Stars are young and fun, and their new system is working in pretty impressive ways.

So here’s to the Soldier Field doubleheader, may it be the beginning of something new and exciting too, for both the Red Stars and the city that’s learning to love them.

The Red Stars still currently sit in third, and have already built such a strong early season record that it would take a much larger collapse than anticipated for them to slip out of playoff position, but I also think the job gets harder from here. After a radical formation and personnel shift in the off-season, Chicago’s last two opponents have taken nuanced approaches against the Red Stars, and it’s begun to work against this young squad.

They’ll get an infusion of leadership as Alyssa Naeher, Mal Pugh, and Bianca St-Georges make their returns from the Concacaf W championship, but other teams have made more aggressive moves during this particular trade window to look dangerous for a playoff push. With the understanding that Chicago is likely going with what they have, let’s take a look at what to lean into, and what to tweak.

First, let’s take a look at Chicago’s top performers in goals added, a metric that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of a player when taking actions that add the likelihood of chances at the attacking end. We all know that Mal Pugh is one of the more dynamic players in the entire NWSL, but where she particularly shines the most is on the dribble. Pugh’s passes don’t always connect, which is as much about being on the same page as her teammates as her own accuracy. But she’s by far the best dribbler in the league, which becomes clear both when you see her on the field and when you look at her numbers.

So, we know that when Pugh picks up the ball at the halfway line, other teams have to start scrambling, but that was probably obvious. So what else is happening for the Red Stars in transition? Are the Red Stars this year really the Mallory Pugh show, and only able to go as far as she carries them?

As we saw in Chicago’s 1-1-1 record during the Concacaf W championship, the answer is definitely not a yes but also not completely a no. Bianca St-George is still second in the team in goals added, specifically in her ability to get on the end of her teammates’ passes, which as we’ve seen with Pugh’s connection rate can be something the Red Stars occasionally struggle with. There’s a level of calm that comes with the knowledge that a hopeful ball sent out wide is going to have a wingback finding the right touch on the end of it, and that’s the kind of edge St-George brings to the Red Stars attack.

That Chicago’s two most positive field players in +/- effectiveness are the two that were called into international duty for the Concacaf W championship shouldn’t surprise anyone, nor should the fact that Ava Cook rounds out the top three. Cook also excels at receiving the ball in space, turning and shooting—an obvious skill for a No. 9, but one that I believe will prove to be more crucial for the Red Stars as the season goes on. Following Cook are wingbacks Rachel Hill and Sarah Luebbert, which positionally also makes the most sense, but doesn’t necessarily back up Chicago’s mantra that their midfield is their strength.

Ella Stevens has done a nice job when called upon to be more of a connective outlet for the team, but she told the media that she’s still learning the small movements and angles that make up effective central forward play. Stevens specifically credited Cook’s natural movements while receiving service as ones she wants to emulate, and while Cook has been a good substitute in recent matches, one has to wonder if it’s not worth a look at her and Stevens on the field together in different roles.

The Red Stars have been playing out of their box midfield with success so far this season, but it’s required a stretching of roles that feels less sustainable as other teams rise to the heights of their powers as we hit the home stretch. Vanessa DiBernardo has never had a game without nice moments on both sides of the ball, and Danny Colaprico is a steady veteran presence both when paired with DiBernardo or with Yuki Nagasato, but there are going to be diminishing returns from those efforts as teams figure Chicago out. As we saw in last weekend’s game against Houston, when the sharpness isn’t there the team becomes very vulnerable to quick counter attacks, and the Red Stars’ opponents are beginning to force the issue.

Ironically, Morgan Gautrat’s total of 83 minutes so far in 2022 stands out as one of the more clinical performances in the midfield, which again throws into perspective just how stretched those central roles have become in order to make up for her absence. We don’t know if Gautrat will truly make a comeback at any point this season (the club keeps pushing her return time back by four-week intervals every time they are asked), and it seems like Chicago’s answer has been for the current veterans to cover more ground to keep the ship afloat alongside very young teammates.

Working on an ever-shrinking roster in recent weeks, some of those cracks have begun to show, and it has infringed on Chicago’s ability to both retain the ball and advance it. DiBernardo’s conversion to defensive midfielder is heroic, but the amount of field she’s been asked to cover to also generate attack will eventually come at a price down the stretch. Nagasato has also struggled physically at times this season, to the point where she actually has the lowest +/- on the entire team in goals added. In negating the team’s weaknesses, they’ve actually begun to impede their own strengths, and when the intensity ratchets up and teams start playing every game like a knockout the Red Stars will once again have to adjust.

The good news is I don’t think white-knuckling through a war of attrition has to be written in stone for the team, even if they run the rest of the table with only the players they currently have available. If Colaprico and DiBernardo are the better defensive midfield duo, keep them there for the rest of the season. Give Nagasato a break and keep her for game states where you need to hold onto a lead and slow the game down. Start two of Pugh, Griffith, or Sarah Luebbert (if she’s not needed at wingback) as your No. 10’s. Invest in Cook as the lone No. 9 as long as she stays fit, and consider Stevens’s strengths as a connector when deciding which attacking midfielders she fits best with—probably your dribblers, rather than your passers.

There is enough attacking talent on the Red Stars roster that sacrificing the spine of the defense shouldn’t be necessary, and the three-back is going to need more support in front of them to make it through the next stretch of games. The rotation we’ve seen has been both fun and necessary as Chicago has figured out their identity, but it’s time to sharpen the team from a blunt force object into a blade.

Because what comes with winning is a small side sampling of expectations, and the Red Stars have earned that as we get closer to the postseason. They’ll take on the league-leading Wave next week at Soldier Field, and what an opportunity for a statement win that would be.

The Red Stars got a result at the death on Sunday, earning a draw against the North Carolina Courage 2-2, despite going into stoppage time down two goals. The game wasn’t Chicago’s best effort, as they would admit after it was over.

But again the team found a way to keep its regular season campaign going strong, despite dealing with a press from North Carolina that gave them more trouble than they were used to thus far this season.

In classic NWSL fashion, that stoppage time period held more than a little bit of chaos. So I’ve compiled a breakdown of everything that happened in those final five minutes of the game, to maybe bring some order to a whirlwind finish:

90:00 – A minimum of three minutes of stoppage time is added to the end of the game after a half that saw a number of substitutions and one goal. Chicago has been pushing to get back into the match, but North Carolina has been staunch in defending in the box.

90+0:20 – Chicago immediately gets their first goal back on a fantastic two-player effort! Vanessa DiBernardo curls the ball up towards Sarah Griffith, perfectly splitting the defenders. Griffith then weights the ball perfectly, chipping it over Katelyn Rowland to beat the keeper off her line. The scoreline is now 2-1 in favor of North Carolina.

90+1:05 – Restart after the goal, almost 45 seconds later. Chicago took a moment to huddle in celebration, before running back towards the center circle. In the stadium, there was also a bit of a scuffle as the Courage slowed the Red Stars down briefly in their attempts to bring the ball back to the half-field line, as noted by the center official, who reprimanded the Courage.

90+1:11 – Foul called on the Red Stars at midfield.

90+1:26 – North Carolina with an unhurried restart after the foul.

90+1:30 – North Carolina free kick goes immediately out of bounds. Chicago throw-in, that gets bogged down in the midfield for 45 seconds.

90+ 2:15 – Things are about to get weirder. After the ball bounces around the midfield, North Carolina’s Ryan Williams sends a ball forward to Jorian Baucom. Tatumn Milazzo is beaten by the ball, and the Red Stars defense has been stretched and split, forcing Zoe Morse into a last-ditch recovery run

90+2:20 – Baucom switches the ball from her right foot to her left in the box, and Morse catches her by the ankles. Baucom embellishes the contact slightly, but it’s a clear foul from the Red Stars defender. Upon not hearing a whistle, Baucom then stands up and sends an open shot on frame wide of the post, with Emily Boyd bearing in on the angle.

90+2:25 – Baucom can’t believe it, but the Red Stars are given a goal kick off the missed shot.

90+2:57 – Before the restart, North Carolina makes a late substitute, bringing Katie Bowen on for Jaelene Daniels

90+3:02 – Emily Boyd finally takes the resulting goal kick. At this point, the original minimum amount of stoppage time has occurred.

90+3:18 – Chicago’s buildup goes slightly wrong, and a missed touch by Jill Aguilera sends the ball out for a North Carolina throw-in.

90+3:25 – The Courage is in no hurry, and the ball is thrown back in play

90+3:45 – Another throw-in, this time in favor of Chicago off a quick clearance booted into the stands by Abby Erceg. Aguilera takes it as quickly as she can after grabbing another available ball.

90+3:58 – A heavy deflection occurs to send the ball out on the North Carolina end-line. This moment is probably the deciding factor of the game. The center official indicates she is going to let the Red Stars play a last-chance corner kick before blowing the final whistle. The Courage defense turns to the ref in slight protest, but prepares for the kick.

90+4:20 – Danny Colaprico makes contact with the ball from the corner, whipped in towards the far post

90+4:22 – Closing her eyes and “praying to the man upstairs”, Amanda Kowalski ties the game with a towering header at the far post! The crowd erupts, the team piles on, the match is tied 2-2.

Final: And that’s the last touch of the match! The referee immediately blows the final whistle, and the Red Stars are still undefeated in nine games and have not yet lost at home this season. Whether there’s much more to read into the result than the product of unfailing belief, a little bit of loose officiating, and a bit of luck is hard to say. But these are the kind of points that set a team up well for a big finish, and Chicago lives to fight another day with their unbeaten streak intact.

Mal Pugh starts, USWNT defeats Colombia 3-0

Mallory Pugh got the start on Saturday for the U.S. women’s national team, as they went on to defeat Colombia 3-0 in the first of their two tune-up friendlies before World Cup qualifying. With the win, the USA extended its home unbeaten streak to 68 games which includes 61 wins and seven draws.

Pugh sat in her traditional role with the national team as a left winger, and had a few nice chances in front of goal in the first half, most notably a shot off a nice pass from Sophia Smith that she really should have sunk had she let the ball hit her left foot. She instead went to strike with her natural right foot, and sent the ball wide.

Outside of that chance, it was an afternoon of frustration for Pugh in her home state of Colorado. She’s a player who has had to deal with physicality in the NWSL this year, but that kind of play ramps up even more on the international level. She let herself get heated more than once, and her night was perhaps most illustrated by an odd collision with the U.S. team photographer, and a bit of shoving on the outside of the box as she awaited the taking of a penalty kick by her teammate.

Alyssa Naeher did not play in the first game of the friendly series, but don’t be surprised if she gets extended minutes this evening in game two.

Bianca St-Georges makes Canada WCQ team

After a meniscus injury forced her out of Canada’s plans for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and a rocky club season in 2021, Bianca St-Georges is back in the national team’s long-term plans off the strength of a very good start to the year. After making the provisional and camp rosters prior to a final 23-player World Cup qualifying squad, St-Georges was confirmed to be going with Canada to Monterrey for the Concacaf W Championship.

Canada head coach Bev Priestman told reporter Harjeet Johal on St-George, “She’s had an outstanding season in the NWSL. She excites me, I think that’s the important thing. She’s got an incredible mindset, she’s powerful, difficult to beat, and I think she’ll fit in our system really well. Yeah, over the moon for her.”

St-Georges did not play in Canada’s final tune-up friendly before the tournament, a 0-0 draw against South Korea.

Ava Cook scores for the U-23’s

The USWNT U-23 squad traveled to Sweden during the international break, to play in a three-nations friendly tournament with the host country and India.

In their first match, their first ever against India at the youth level, Chicago’s Ava Cook would score the final goal of the game in the 86th minute, as the team went on to a 4-1 win. She was the only player on the roster currently on an NWSL team to make the scoresheet.

Chicago announces new assistant coach

The Red Stars made a little bit of news of their own this week, announcing the hiring of Morinao Imaizumi as a full-time assistant coach. After the departure of Julianne Sitch to become head coach of the men’s program at University of Chicago, the Red Stars had been short in their technical staffing (anecdotally, media could see the equipment managers helping with warm-ups on gameday).

Imaizumi has experience with Yuki Nagasato as the assistant coach of the Nadeshiko in 2004, during the team’s Olympic campaign that year. He also has worked with Casey Krueger as an assistant coach at Florida State University during her time there.

Imaizumi actually joins the Red Stars from his second stint under Mark Krikorian at FSU, where he was on staff for the team’s 2018 and 2021 National Championships. Krikorian also recently left the program, citing differences in vision with the school’s new athletic director over support for the women’s soccer team. Krikorian was recently announced as the new President of Soccer Operations for the Washington Spirit.

“I played for the U-19 Japanese national team 18 years ago that Imaizumi-san coached. I was super young and had a lot to learn, on and off the field, and he helped guide me in the right direction,” said Nagasato in a team press release. “His passion for soccer is amazing. He will bring huge possibilities to the team and push us to a higher level.”

“I worked with Imaizumi at Florida State where he helped me tremendously in learning the outside back position and was a huge asset in helping the team succeed,” said Krueger. “I’m looking forward to working with him again and know that he will be a wonderful addition to the Red Stars organization.”

Two Red Stars make June Team of the Month

After a month that saw the team go unbeaten, it’s not surprising that the Red Stars had a couple players on the NWSL Media Association’s Team of the Month (of which I am a voting member, full disclosure.)

Pugh’s addition to the squad is almost written in pen at this point, as she scored three goals and notched an assist in just four games in June. But Tatumn Milazzo also got a nod in defense, which is a very nice piece of recognition for the current most capped player Chicago’s backline. I must admit, I voted for Zoe Morse to get some recognition herself, but Milazzo’s tenacity as a 1v1 defender has been immense for the Red Stars’ steady performances this month, and her shoutout is well deserved.

The team isn’t quite halfway through the regular season yet, but by all expectations, they’ve done very well. 2021 MVP finalist Mallory Pugh is once again a frontrunner for individual awards, with six goals and two assists in seven games. Chicago’s system has also made them very difficult to play, and their only loss thus far came from a one-goal deficit away at San Diego.

If the season stopped now, we’d all surely shake hands, call it a job well done, and wait for the team’s availability report to clear up in the future. But both fortunately and unfortunately, there are 13 more games left on the slate, and Chicago will have to figure out how to keep their momentum going during the international period.

It’s no secret the Red Stars will miss Pugh and Alyssa Naeher as they go through World Cup qualifying with the USWNT, but there’s also the possibility of Bianca St. Georges also heading down to Monterrey with Canada. Arin Wright and Morgan Gautrat are still a few weeks away from match fitness, and the addition of Kayla Sharples to the season-ending injury list this week has left the Red Stars with a few things to ponder about how they want to see out the rest of the season.

What to do with the defense?

The Red Stars’ three-back defensive approach has been a winner this season, despite the growing pains with a young group. The trio of Sharples, Zoe Morse, and Tatumn Milazzo saw Chicago through the worst of their front-loaded schedule, and rookie Amanda Kowalski came in and did a nice job when Sharples went down. 

“We had no doubts that Amanda could step in and take on the role,” Morse said after Chicago’s 2-2 draw against Kansas City this weekend. “It meant me shifting into the middle, and I’ve played there once or twice before. So it wasn’t that big of a shift. “

The three-back hasn’t been perfect, as seen in another set-piece goal given up on Saturday, but it has been effective as the best utilization of Chicago’s roster, which has become increasingly imbalanced on all lines. But now the team runs the risk of running its young center-backs into the ground, or even worse — somehow end up with further injury.

“It’s tough having a low amount of center-backs when you have to have three of them,” Kowalski said. “But I think the personnel that we have, I think the shape that we’re in is probably the best one. And it’s one that we’ve been working on all season.”

Morse and Kowalski are right; it doesn’t make sense for Chicago to drop into a back-four for the rest of the season, but therein lies a couple of issues. Emily Boyd will be stepping in for Naeher during the period while internationals are away, which will be the most game-time she’s seen in some time after Cassie Miller locked down the backup keeper spot in 2021 before being traded to Kansas City. Communication between Boyd and the backline will be key, especially without Sharples’s aerial presence to keep other teams honest when sending crosses in.

Outside of the group on the field, which can certainly get the job done, one has to wonder how Chicago approaches balancing a roster in danger of ballooning in size should they bring a fourth center-back in midseason. Kowalski, signed after Tierna Davidson’s ACL tear, is on a multi-year contract, and plans for the three-back also included Casey Krueger, who will be making her eventual return from pregnancy.

If the Red Stars were in a win-now kind of a season, making the move for another center-back would make sense, but they might be stuck in playing the long game instead. In terms of depth, the return of Gautrat will be key for the defensive spine of a team that is carrying high numbers of attacking midfielders and wingbacks.

As it stands, Chicago isn’t the only team that could use a talented center-back, and the options both abroad and in the league might prove too restrictive to make a significant difference this year. Expect Morse to be the quiet leader of the group going forward.

Who scores with Pugh out?

With questions on the defensive end, the Red Stars will have to go into this next stretch of the season without relying solely on shutouts to get results. Pugh’s influence in Chicago’s attack can’t be overstated; even if she were not the team’s goal leader, her ability to pull defenders and create space keeps the Red Stars’ attack from becoming too predictable.

I expect Chicago to rely heavily on their attacking midfield during this stretch, with the right mix of Sarah Griffith, Yuki Nagasato, Vanessa DiBernardo, Jill Aguilera, Sarah Luebbert, Ava Cook, and Ella Stevens proving key to pick up the goal-scoring slack. The Red Stars are at their best when they’re producing through the midfield, rather than sending endless crosses in from outside like they occasionally were forced into against the Current this weekend. 

Aguilera and Luebbert have done a nice job in wingback roles, but their greatest utilization in the next few weeks might be to allow them to drift centrally. Rachel Hill can also ask questions of a defense if she’s able to switch to her dominant right foot, but can be defended well if she’s forced to truly play the role of a left-footed wingback. St-Georges availability will also play a large role—while Hill has played both right and left wingback, who most comfortably lines up opposite her will probably dictate how she’s used.

“I think we’re gonna have to try to match up players with styles we’re playing against, or ways that we want to play, or certain parts of the field maybe that we want to try to exploit,” head coach Chris Petrucelli said this weekend, noting that while Chicago will be missing a number of players, so will everybody else. “One of the things that I’m happy about is, over the course of the Challenge Cup and the other parts of the season we played a lot of players and we have a lot of depth. And we can use players in different situations.”

Strength in numbers

Ultimately, Chicago will rely on its system to get them through the rest of the year the same way they have since the season’s beginning. They will stack numbers in the midfield, play through the central box as Plan A, and stretch with width as Plan B. And, as they have all year, they will hold the internal expectation of improvement every week.

As Petrucelli put it: “If you go back and watch us play at the Challenge Cup, and you go back and watch us play now, we’re a better team right now than we were before. And [we’re] hoping that we will be a better team, in July, and August, and September, than we are right now.”

The Red Stars have a week off before they travel to New Jersey for their first meeting with Gotham FC on July 2

It’s a brilliant start to the season by any measure, certainly considering the shakeup to the team’s roster and coaching staff in the offseason. So why did Sunday’s 1-0 win feel at times like the wheels are beginning to fall off?

The Red Stars began the match all over the Orlando Pride, with Sarah Luebbert pushing further forward as a wingback, and the interplay between the attacking midfielders and Sarah Griffith as the lone striker giving Orlando very little time with the ball. Pugh’s rocket in the 10th minute was a world-class strike, but it came from a run of play that Chicago dominated with ease, and it felt like the Red Stars could finish the half with an even more lopsided scoreline.

But when Kayla Sharples went down with what looked like a serious knee injury in the 24th minute, everybody froze. Sharples has played every minute of Chicago’s regular season campaign thus far, and has more significantly taken up the space left by Tierna Davidson in the center-most center-back position within the Red Stars’ back-three defense. She’s been a key aerial presence, both in set piece opportunities and when opponents whip the ball into the box. She’s also the most experienced player on the backline, having played with the team since 2019 and having successful stints both in Finland and Australia. Sharples has been ready for the big stage ever since the 2020 Challenge Cup, and this year felt like the culmination of her hard work combined with a calm mind in the middle of the defense.

Then she went into a challenge in isolation against Orlando’s Abi Kim, her plant foot failed her, and she had to immediately leave the game. Rookie Amanda Kowalski then came on with 21 minutes left in the first half, and the young Red Stars suddenly felt a whole lot younger. Stepping up immediately, Tatumn Milazzo slotted in centrally with Zoe Morse and Kowalski on either side. Milazzo played outside-back in place of Casey Krueger in the latter half of the 2021 season, and has done well on the left side of the back-three. But she was suddenly consulting with Alyssa Naeher on who should go up for corner kicks, and who should stay back in the chance of a quick counter-attack (Milazzo and Kowalski went up, Morse stayed.) 

“It always shakes you up a little bit, when one of your teammates is down, and it looks like that,” Milazzo said after the match. “So, in that moment, I was just like, Okay, let’s check the time, get through this half with what we have, and then regroup at halftime.”

The defense would make a slight positional adjustment after the half, with Morse (who has the most NWSL center-back experience in the trio, if by a slim margin) taking over in the middle of the formation. However, she wasn’t alone; the Red Stars rallied around their defense in numbers. Vanessa DiBernardo and Bianca St-Georges told head coach Chris Petrucelli to keep them on after halftime, and Danny Colaprico came in to further shore up the defensive midfield.  “Vanessa said ‘let me go.’ Bianca said ‘let me go,’’ he said. “So it was encouraging, satisfying to see those guys like, ‘Hey we need to get the points here. I will run until I die.”

Pugh also played another complete 90-minute match, dropping right in front of the No. 6’s in the second half to provide an outlet whenever necessary, and push forward whenever her legs would allow her. Yuki Nagasato also had her most effective game of the season, as the Red Stars tried to put the game in a sleeper hold to hold onto the 1-0 win. “I think that’s what you saw the most tonight,” Naeher said after the game. “Just the end of a five game stretch. Everybody gave everything that they had, everybody’s fighting, everybody’s giving every last ounce of energy that they’ve got.”

It’s the do-or-die attitude that Chicago has always prided themselves on, and it’s working. But there’s also some serious cause for concern that this is where the team is both mentally and physically only eight games into a 22-game season. The Red Stars have stepped up in the face of long-term absence after long-term absence, but defending by committee gets a lot harder when two center-backs of the exact same physical profile go down at the beginning of a season. 

They no longer have the size to anchor a three-back, and they don’t have the numbers for a back four. Vanessa DiBernardo is giving everything she has every game in a positional pivot that cements her club legend status, but it’s because Chicago doesn’t actually have two No.6’s to run their duel six midfield. Pugh and Naeher, crucial both in defense as they are in attack, are about to take their talents to Monterrey to help the USWNT qualify for the 2023 World Cup.

And while it’s great that the Red Stars are willing to run themselves into the ground to get a win, they shouldn’t have to. For all the revamping Chicago has done in 2022, that sentiment echoes last year’s championship run, and it worries me.

“Our mindset in-season right now, (…) There’s nothing we can do. There’s nothing we can change. And our focus is one game at a time,” Naeher said about the punishing schedule. “What’s our game plan for this game? How do we get points? How do we get wins? We’ll figure out Kansas City next week. But I do think it needs to be addressed.”

The Red Stars will play Washington again this week, this time at home, and one could be forgiven if the second half of Wednesday’s game is circled in red pen as a danger zone for the whole squad. Chicago has played three games in the last week, with two more to go before they return back to a weekly matchday schedule. This section of the season has been tough, but the team has also found a way to make it this far in the 14-day stretch without losing a match.

The most promising performance the Red Stars have pulled together this season actually came when the team was at its most tired, in a somewhat surprising 1-0 win over OL Reign on Saturday. With only two days between their matchup with the Spirit and the beginning of their three-game homestand, Chicago had to rely on tired legs and a healthy amount of rotation. Sarah Luebbert and Jill Aguilera lined up as the team’s wingbacks, as the absences of Arin Wright and Bianca St-Georges, in addition to short rest, dictated that Rachel Hill and Alyssa Mautz couldn’t carry the load alone. Aguilera was tasked with keeping tabs on former Red Star Sofia Huerta, who had been an important generator of the Reign’s attack in recent weeks. 

Getting through a series of games in quick succession like Chicago has requires a certain amount of pinpoint accuracy in how many players get minutes where, and concessions made on Wednesday benefitted the team on the weekend. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times already this season, Danny Colaprico and Vanessa DiBernardo have been the most reliable defensive midfield duo available to the Red Stars thus far this season, and both split 45 minute performances in D.C. On Saturday, they went the distance, holding the midfield down against the likes of Rose Lavelle for the entirety of regulation.

“Those guys are good,” head coach Chris Petrucelli said after the match, “They can run forever, they tackle, but they’re good with the ball as well. That’s what I like best about them, because we can play through them and keep the ball.”

It’s true that DiBernardo and Colaprico have been willing to put the miles in for the team this year, and Petrucelli said he was happy to see them make it through the whole game, but they also give Chicago the option to pass around their opponent’s press. After another fantastic goal by Mallory Pugh had given the Red Stars a slim lead on Saturday, that same concern settled in that the rest of the game was going to be a battle that Chicago’s legs wouldn’t be able to withstand. OL Reign is a punishing team to play against; they win the ball well, they’re very good at strategic physicality, and they were pressing for an equalizer. 

But instead of Chicago falling into a five-back and daring the Reign to take their chances, the Red Stars worked the system to their advantage. Multiple times as the game progressed, DiBernardo or Colaprico would be set upon by three Reign players in possession. Instead of forcing a dribble or a forward pass, both midfielders deftly turned and found the right outlet to keep the ball moving and the home side firmly in control. Aguilera kept up with Huerta for 75 solid minutes, and even pushed forward with Luebbert enough to force the Reign defense to stay honest as they tried to force a high line. Pugh advanced the ball on the dribble with ease, and took one for the team (more often than she would have likely preferred), suffering tackles that slowed the game down and kept the Reign out of possession.

It’s also significant that in the three games played in this stretch, the personnel of the three-back defense has remained the same, and they’re beginning to gel. Zoe Morse and Tatumn Milazzo have developed enough comfort with their roles that they are not only moving in their own spaces well, but they can communicate forward when a more green wingback needs to stay home and when they should push forward in transition. They, alongside Kayla Sharples, seem to be taking direction well from Alyssa Naeher, and the team presented a preference for playing out of the back while still making good decisions when they saw a possible counter-attacking opportunity.

If none of this sounds all that exciting, it would accurately reflect many of the stretches of play on Saturday. But it also shows how Chicago was able to see the game out without completely running out of gas once they had the lead.

“We’ve got to give a lot of credit to the three in the back and Alyssa, I mean they’ve played every minute through this stretch and they really haven’t given up much,” Petrucelli said.

The Red Stars’ passing map made up in organization what it lacked in creative freedom, with the wingbacks taking a more defensive line while providing outlet options from the midfield. And if you have to get into a close one while preserving a clean sheet, it helps to have arguably the most in-form striker in the league at your disposal.

“I just thought we were gritty and determined and fatigued. I thought the first half we were running in mud,” Petrucelli said. “… it was never going to be pretty. But you know, the whole thing was trying to find a way to get a goal and protect it as much as you can. And fortunately, it worked out for us.”

What’s ahead

The Red Stars don’t have much time to rest on their accomplishments, as they take on the Spirit on Wednesday, followed by a match against the Orlando Pride on Saturday, June 12. It takes a lot to get these kinds of games right, and Chicago — despite their youth — haven’t looked shaken by the responsibility yet.

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The games themselves are all tough: The Portland Thorns and OL Reign are formidable opponents, they have two games against 2021 NWSL champions Washington Spirit, and then cap the stint off with their second match against the Orlando Pride. They’re off to a good start, with a draw against the Thorns on Saturday that saw the team take a number of important steps forward as a unit.

A theme this season already lies in Chicago’s well-known playmakers stepping up and also seeing steady progress from the youngest members of the game-day 18.

Saturday’s draw saw both. A benefit of having a player like Mallory Pugh on your team means that even if your system is slightly methodical, there’s never any accounting for a striker making a goal out of nothing. 

Pugh did just that in the fifth minute, after collecting a pass from Ava Cook. When Pugh goes into 1v1 battles on the ball, it’s increasingly unlikely that her defensive counterpart is going to be able to make an interception that won’t result in a foul. Portland’s Kelli Hubly had no choice but to try to push the angle on Pugh pace for pace, which Pugh adjusted to all too easily to put the Red Stars ahead.

But despite Portland’s new lineup and leadership, the Thorns are the Thorns, and Hina Sugita equalized almost immediately on a nice shot from a tight angle. It’s hard to tell if the Red Stars fell foul of the “danger zone” philosophy, wherein the most dangerous moments to concede come immediately after stoppages of play (in this case, Pugh’s goal), but Sugita had space and time in the box that Chicago did not really concede in the run of play again.

As anticipated, the midfields mostly canceled each other out, though Portland’s line of contention sat slightly further up the pitch than Chicago’s. The two No. 10s—Pugh and Nagasato—weren’t relied upon significantly for defensive duties in the box midfield system, though Pugh has the capability to drop back to help the team defensively if necessary. That leaves the duo of Vanessa DiBernardo and Danny Colaprico to hold court in a No. 6 partnership, and they’re increasingly doing a nice job. 

Colaprico is in fine form as a disruptor, with a clear role in blowing up play and winning the ball, but she also hasn’t lost much in the way of her on the ball capabilities. Her passing has also been exceptional, averaging an  impressive 80 percent passing accuracy when passing into the opposition’s half, and 86 percent accuracy overall. DiBernardo, not one to bring an overly physical presence, is another distributor, setting the tempo and sending the ball forward whenever possible. 

A common mistake in passing stats interpretation involves removing the context of where a player is actually passing to. Lateral and backward passes are obviously going to show a higher completion rate due to a general lack of defensive actions against them. The other team is going to be happy to direct midfielders towards passes in low-danger areas. But Colaprico and DiBernardo are almost always passing in front of them, and they are clearly finding the wingers and the No. 10s making the right runs.

The mistakes tend to appear perhaps one step after the pass from the defensive midfield area, when a heavy touch or passes made just a little too quickly led to turnovers as the first half progressed, which put the defense under unnecessary pressure. The three-back of Morse, Sharples, and Milazzo had their best match of the season despite the two goals conceded, not least in just how clean they played even when a player as dangerous as Sophia Smith got in between the lines.

“As a backline, the past couple of games and this last week of practice, we’ve been talking about just focusing on those details and like those small things,” Sharples said after the match. “In the grand scheme of things in playing the games we’ve been decent, but there’s things that we can clean up.”

Ava Cook would notch her second assist of the night before halftime, finished by Rachel Hill (who had another very active evening filling in at wingback in both the left and right channels). But while Chicago didn’t present many holes in the defense in either possession or transition, they struggled again with set-piece defending, conceding their third goal off a dead ball play in as many games. Just after the second half kicked off, a number of Red Stars failed to clear the ball after a Portland corner kick, allowing Smith to just flick the ball up and shoot from very close range.

“It’s quite frustrating,” Sharples said, “constantly giving up set piece goals.”

It also would prove the difference-maker, as the team did a nice job seeing the rest of the game out while committing to their usual substitute rotation. Portland put a number of veterans on to chase all three points, but Chicago’s rookies held firm to end the match 2-2.

While a number of decisions are going to be made with a midweek game against the Washington Spirit, followed by three matches next week, the Red Stars approached the game against Portland like any other game. “With this one, we had a full week to play it the way we wanted to play it,” head coach Chris Petrucelli said. “And we also have a full four days before before the next one. So I think that’s right on the edge of enough time.”

While the coaching staff will be focused on making sure no player ends up with too many minutes in consecutive matches, the mindset going in is pretty clear: win the day in front of you, and then move on.

“Not only do we have a lot of games, they’re good teams. We’re talking about some of the better teams in the league,” Petrucelli said. “I think it’s really a difficult schedule. But first of all, we have to play the games by themselves— it’s one game. We’ve got to go into each game trying to win one game, not worrying about what’s next and what happened before.”

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To be fair to the Orlando Pride, they were coming off a huge midweek performance that got them a win against Challenge Cup winners North Carolina Courage, and they didn’t have the legs to push Chicago into making many turnovers. The Pride were forced to sit into a mid-block and pick their chances sparingly, and they made a good late push that forced the game into some theatrics at the very end of the match.

But the game also gave us a good look at what the Red Stars are trying to accomplish when their opponent is struggling to disrupt. They moved the ball with fluidity, connecting on over 85 percent of their passes. It gave the match a methodical feel, as Chicago tried to unlock Orlando’s defensive line of contention in order to generate goal-scoring chances. To be frank, it was the kind of match you don’t see a lot in the run-and-gun, transition-heavy NWSL. 

With time on the ball, Chicago got one very good look in front of goal in the early going, and opened the scoring in the 11th minute. I think Zoe Morse has done a nice job filling in at defensive midfield alongside Danny Colaprico, but it’s also clear that her vision in distribution truly shines from a deeper position, as seen in the penetrating ball she sliced through the midfield to find Vanessa DiBernardo. DiBernardo then sent a good ball in to Sarah Griffith, who got the start in the attacking midfield, and the rookie hit it home from close range. 

That goal is a good example of the team-wide cohesion that Chicago is looking for, and it’s also significant that Griffith finished it. The first half of the match saw a number of those same kind of good ideas that didn’t always quite land at the feet of the right finisher, and the Red Stars felt like they left too many chances on the board. “We had way many more chances than we usually have in the past,” Bianca St-Georges said after the match. “And I think younger people, we need to take pride, and show up and take responsibility to score more goals and not just rely on our normal goalscorers.”

While St-Georges is still looking at ways for the team to improve, the fourth-year wingback had another fantastic game, not only in the goal she scored from a tight angle in the second half but in her ability to switch the point of attack with ease. Rachel Hill lined up as St-Georges’s left wingback counterpart, and on multiple occasions the Canadian international saw the space Hill could run into and found her teammate in stride. It’s significant the Red Stars not only were providing the ball to each other’s feet, but that they were delivering the ball into space because they trusted that the right run was going to be made to meet it. 

However, it is true that Chicago struggled to turn all of that good play into the ball hitting the back of the net until Pugh came on after halftime. Head coach Chris Petrucelli was intentional in noting that while the team took some time getting Pugh back into contact training after her concussion, the striker has been doing personal training for much of the last few weeks. You could tell, because she immediately made an impact after subbing on. 

The Pride had been leaving acres of space that the Red Stars were struggling to exploit at the top of the box (I actually want to shout out Naperville legend Megan Montefusco in Orlando’s defensive midfield for being much of the force behind that). But Pugh began to shred their defensive integrity without seeming to hit much of a second gear. She assisted St-Georges’s strike while barely having to move after Orlando failed to close down, and her own tally she got off a bad giveaway as the Pride tried to play out of the back.

Then, as has been the story of the Red Stars’ season so far, the team had to make substitutes and the control over the match wavered. Danny Colaprico hit her 10,000 minute with the club in the second half, and she’s arguably playing some of the best soccer of her career. She’s currently second in the whole league in what American Soccer Analysis calls their expected passing model, meaning in general terms that when she distributes the ball the likelihood of passing success is incredibly high.

When she leaves matches, her absence is immediately felt. Chicago’s roster is also such that the end of games has less to do with changing the game state as it does getting young players more minutes, and resting veterans. Orlando simultaneously brought on Abi Kim who started getting space in 1v1 isolation against Tatumn Milazzo, while Sydney Leroux went to work on Amanda Kowalski, and the Pride’s intensity on the wings generated both of their late goals (though their first, scored by Amy Turner, was likely offside.) There’s not much of a better encapsulation of the team’s balance right now than USWNT veteran Alyssa Naeher bailing Kowalski (who has been good in her minutes thus far) out with a nice penalty save after the rookie made a mistake in the box.

Such is the Red Stars’ identity right now. They’ve been given the freedom to take big steps forward in their style of play and the ability to find one another in space. But it takes a few key pieces to make that style work, and their trajectory this season is going to hinge upon steady upward progress from the young players who are still getting used to the NWSL.

“Obviously, when Mal left, we had to find another identity for our team, because she’s a big part of the team, but having her back is really nice.” said St-Georges. “I feel like she helps us stay complete and more confident. But at the end of the day, we’re still trying to figure out our identity, and we still individually have to be better at just putting the ball [into the back of] the net.”

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Given the availability report, one might also be forgiven for wondering what sort of curse the Red Stars have fallen under. Instead of getting players back into the fold after an unexpected weekend off, the list of absences grew, with Ella Stevens joining Mallory Pugh and Morgan Gautrat as out in the short term. Alyssa Naeher, Danny Colaprico, Arin Wright, and Vanessa DiBernardo were all listed as questionable, which likely informed the game-day decision to have Colaprico and Wright on the bench.

“That availability report was a pretty good team, was a good XI,” head coach Chris Petrucelli said after the match. “I guess our mindset, [that] I talked to them about: anybody that wears the jersey, we’re still the Red Stars, we’re still trying to win the game.” True rookies Amanda Kowalski and Ava Cook started in the defense and attack, respectively, and Zoe Morse got another look in the defensive midfield alongside DiBernardo.

The Red Stars competed throughout the first half of the match, going toe to toe with San Diego’s forward line that did find space on the wings as expected. When Chicago comes out in that dedicated three-back, every run up the wing by players like Bianca St. Georges and (in Sunday’s case) Alyssa Mautz comes at a positional price, which left Tatumn Milazzo, Kayla Sharples, and Kowalski defending in isolation more than felt sustainable to keep a clean sheet.

However, the defense did good things to hold their line for the first 56 minutes of the game, and they felt at halftime like they had a chance to come out of the game with all three points. “At halftime, I thought we were all going in like, we can actually win this game, which was good to see,” Mautz said in post-game availability. “No one was struggling or, like hopes were down. I thought we were all staying positive.”

Ten minutes into the second half, I’m reluctant to blame Kayla Sharples for the mist-timed tackle on Sofia Jakobsson that gave Alex Morgan her third penalty opportunity in two matches. It’s easy to focus on defensive mistakes when they happen, but the bigger issue Chicago faced stemmed from giving the ball away too easily further up the pitch. The Red Stars finished the match with 67.1 percent passing accuracy, a far cry from the 80+ percent they were averaging during their more complete Challenge Cup performances.

The Wave are also very good at getting the ball to their incredibly dangerous front-line quickly. 

“A lot of their chances came from us passing them the ball, and with them, if you pass them the ball, the next ball is going behind you,” Petrucelli said. “We have to be better at keeping the ball, and that’s no matter who is on the field.”

Chicago’s second goal conceded felt a bit like clearance-fatigue, after a blown defensive assignment left San Diego defender Kaleigh Riehl all alone in the box at the end of a free kick sequence. That mistake proved even more frustrating when Ava Cook immediately got a goal back for her first NWSL tally. Jill Aguilera also showed both why she has been one of the preferred rookies off the bench (and that her strengths still lie in the moments she’s focused on getting closer to goal), with a tight angle barely calling an equalizer offside.

In competitive tenacity, the Red Stars likely deserved to get out of the match with a point, even if it would have been earned on defensive intensity rather than the free-flowing football they want to eventually play. The team considered briefly abandoning the three-back system that they’ve used in every game this system, but with the players available to them they stuck with the process, and trust that the results will follow.

Therein lies the positives in a loss like this one. Five rookies got minutes, and Cook joined Stevens in young players contributing to goal-scoring with Pugh temporarily unavailable. “A lot of us knew that people were going to be playing minutes that haven’t gotten a lot maybe, or vice versa. So it was really nice to see everyone step up and have that grittiness,” Cook said after the match. There are hopes that Pugh might clear concussion protocol for next week’s match, and the infusion of talent that Sarah Luebbert and Chelsie Dawber will bring to the side will hopefully give the Red Stars more options and a bit of a clearer approach.

Petrucelli agreed. “Amanda is matched up against Alex Morgan, my guess is that Amanda has got an Alex Morgan poster on the wall somewhere. Ava, obviously [got] the first goal, but she was dangerous the whole game. And we got a real spark from Jill [Aguilera] and Sarah [Griffith], and Sammi [Fisher] towards the end of the game. So I was really proud of what the young guys did.”

And for Mautz, who has been with the Red Stars as part of every iteration of the club in the NWSL’s ten years of operation, it still all comes down to wanting to win. “It definitely was a learning experience, but it still hurt,” she said. “We were in this game. And I think for me, it hurts more just how close we were.”

The Red Stars will look to bounce back on the second game of their road trip, taking on the Orlando Pride on May 22 at 5 pm CT

The Red Stars’ match against the Spirit has been rescheduled for June 8, which has both positives and negatives. An obvious negative is the potential loss of whatever the gate might have been on Saturday, the first nice weather night Chicago would have been the beneficiary of this year.

Whether those fans follow the team to a midweek rescheduled game in June remains to be seen.

In terms of the product on the pitch, there’s also no escaping just how daunting a 12-day stretch the Red Stars are in for from June 1 to June 12. They play away in D.C. on the first of the month (fortunately at Audi Field, and not the punishing turf of Segra Field.) They then come home to play three games in quick succession: they host OL Reign on June 4, have a rematch against Washington on June 8, and then close the week out June 12 against the Orlando Pride.

While a homestand is welcome, four games in 12 days is something of a disaster outside of the Red Stars’ making; at least the Spirit were paid $5,000 each in their losing effort in the Cup final, though they might be rueing the opportunity after that game dissolved into a physical slugfest. The Red Stars will have to plan for heavy rotation, and probably a little bit of luck. However, putting the pain of the rescheduled match a little further into the future might be useful for the Red Stars in the present.

The team’s struggles with absences are well-known at this point, but the cavalry might be coming. It’s unclear what has held up the debut of Australian international Chelsie Dawber, though upon her signing the team did say that her arrival is dependent on visa approval. This likely takes the timeline of when fans will see Dawber up top for the Red Stars out of the team’s hands. Once she arrives, fans should be looking forward to her adjustment to the American game. The 22-year-old scored almost a third of Adelaide United’s goals this past A-league W season. She tallied 10 of the club’s 33 goals alongside three assists.

Similarly up in the air is the return of Sarah Luebbert, after Club America crashed out of the Liga MX Femenil Clausura Quarterfinals against Pachuca (after the match America head coach Craig Harrington, who Chicago fans might remember, was promptly fired.) Luebbert earned a contract with Chicago in 2020 after joining preseason as a non-roster invitee. She had promising moments for the Red Stars in the 2020 Fall Series, and went down to Mexico City on loan in August of 2021. She’s flourished in Liga MX Femenil, quickly becoming a fan favorite and a consistent contributor for a team that was stacked on talent and struggled to put it all together under their current leadership.

Luebbert extended her stay in Mexico City in early 2022, opening up questions as to where she sees herself playing for the next year. The Red Stars told me in preseason they expect her back in camp upon the end of her loan term, but one has to imagine that if her wishes lay elsewhere, she’d have the financial backing to come to appropriate terms with her NWSL club. Circumstances in Chicago have also obviously shifted quite a bit since she left; the Red Stars have a new coach, a new style of play, and a much thinner roster on their front line. If Luebbert wants an opportunity for significant playing time back in the U.S., this would appear to be a good situation to walk back into; the team needs her.

Outside of a few moving pieces in acquisitions, any more time to get Mallory Pugh and Morgan Gautrat healthy again will also be important for this early segment of the NWSL season. Pugh and Gautrat’s contributions to the squad are obvious, but there’s also a natural strain on other members of the team when they aren’t on the field. Chicago’s ability to possess in the midfield is limited by Gautrat’s absence, forcing veterans like Danny Colaprico and Vanessa Dibernardo to cover immense amounts of ground. Pugh herself is a drifter, and without her underrated defensive workrate the Red Stars’ new lean defensive shape in the back has been put under more consistent pressure.

Their next game is their first-ever against the San Diego Wave, who are coming off the biggest win in the club’s short history, a 4-0 drubbing of Gotham FC. Chicago has gotten a chance to ease into their season in defense, but they haven’t faced anything quite like Alex Morgan off a career performance yet in 2022. If they can use fresh legs to press the San Diego defense, the Wave have shown they can be rattled into mistakes. The Red Stars’ preferred style of play actually should unlock the San Diego midfield if they execute well, but they aren’t going to want to give the Wave frontline as much time on the ball as they gave Louisville in their season debut.

So in the short run, the team might ultimately look at the weekend off as a blessing, and June as a challenge. Chicago’s trajectory in 2022 is going to take some time, so all the better to take on the first month of the season with rejuvenated energy, and let the rest of the summer fall as it may.

Following their third loss in a title game in as many years, scandal rocked the team in the offseason, including the quietly accepted resignation of long-time manager Rory Dames prior to allegations of emotional abuse both at the youth and professional being reported by the Washington Post. Following Dames’s departure, the team honored a number of trade requests, including that of long-time defensive stalwart Sarah Gorden, former captain Julie Ertz, and many important depth players like Katie Johnson and Nikki Stanton.

Not to say that the Red Stars don’t have some of the most dynamic players in the sport. Chicago came into 2022 with a squad of remaining veterans bolstered by draft picks and a few key acquisitions, bringing Yuki Nagasato back to the windy city and prepping for the eventual debut of Australian forward Chelsea Dawber. Alyssa Naeher has been excellent in her return from a knee injury suffered during last year’s Olympics, Tierna Davidson appears in all ways to be the heir-apparent to the center-back legacy with the USWNT, Mallory Pugh has been on a goal-scoring tear for both club and country, and Gautrat’s steady presence in the midfield worked her back into a national team conversation that had all but ended. 

Some of those bright spots have stayed in hibernation thus far; frankly, the Red Stars are currently missing a lot of key talent, and downplaying the situation doesn’t do the rest of the squad any favors. Casey Krueger and Sarah Woldmoe are both on maternity leave, Kealia Watt is still on her way back from an ACL tear in the 2021 playoffs, Davidson suffered a season-ending ACL tear mid-Challenge Cup, Gautrat has been dealing with a lingering calf issue for over a month, and Pugh has now missed two consecutive games with a concussion.

When your availability report absences could fill out a globally competitive five-a-side, things are understandably going to look a little bit different on the field. What the Red Stars have decided will see them through the year intact is to commit to a formation and a style that will allow those players to return as seamlessly as possible. The 2021 Red Stars were a very regimented group, playing like one firmly-flexed muscle as they thrived on influencing games without the ball. It was an occasionally dull style of play that saw games swing on the smallest of margins, but by the end of the season they found themselves to be very adept at grinding out results.

In 2022, new manager Chris Petrucelli’s professed preferred style is light years away from the tactics that saw Chicago hold on all the way to the championship game last year. They want to possess, aided by additional numbers in the midfield, and break lines of disruption with a free-flowing passing structure. They’ve committed to a three-back defense, with two wingbacks pushed up to get numbers forward in transition, while retaining the ability to slot into a five-back should they get pinned back by their opponent. If you froze the midfield formation at kickoff, you’d see a hexagon; two No. 10’s and two No. 6’s create a box inner midfield, with the wingbacks on either side to provide width. A lone striker sits atop the formation, though the fluidity of the concept allows for help from either wing at any time.

As one can imagine, with a radically new system and many players getting their first serious professional minutes, the Red Stars have had moments where they look perfectly in tune with one another and moments where they look like they met for the first time that morning. Gautrat and Davidson provided much of the distribution in Chicago last year, and Gautrat’s return will be key to Chicago’s ability to retain the ball. Their style also encourages other teams to press, and they’re still working out how to unlock that pressure without turning the ball over or having to scramble on the wings (in their recent win against Racing Louisville they defended over 40 crosses). 

But just like last year, the Red Stars are ready to step up. Rather than getting to partner with Davidson, fourth-year center-back Kayla Sharples has had a huge amount of responsibility placed on her shoulders to keep the three-back organized, and she’s done very well. Zoe Morse has been a Swiss Army knife, playing both as a left-center-back and stepping into a defensive midfield partnership with Danny Colaprico. Colaprico has been tremendous as the veteran No.  6, and team captain Vanessa DiBernardo has done a good job being whatever she’s asked to be within that central midfield channel.

The veteran energy on the squad has been good, and the younger players on the team are feeding off of it. “Losing the players we’ve lost, it’s been big,” Ella Stevens said after the team’s regular-season opener. “It’s, ‘how are we going to fill those spots?’ But I think we’re trying to figure out ‘okay, how can we do it together.’” Naeher also liked what she’s seen from the rookies, though everyone acknowledges that the team has got a ways to go. “It’s a little bit of baptism by fire in a lot of ways,” she said. “I think they’ve all stepped in, they’ve done well.”

The Red Stars weren’t at their best in their opening matchup against Racing Louisville, but they still got the win 2-1, and that’s important too. There’s still a DNA within the player pool that will do everything it can to bend and not break, even when things aren’t working perfectly.

The CHGO Red Stars adventure begins today

So here’s to a new journey of self-discovery in Bridgeview, and I’m excited to see where things go. Let Sandra Herrera and I be your guides as we chat all things Red Stars live on YouTube at 1pm on Fridays, and expect more in-depth written content from me weekly. It’s all the coverage you know us for in NWSL, but with a newly refreshed Chicago focus that you can’t get anywhere else. It’s $8.99 for a monthly subscription, or consider the $59.98 yearly subscription that gets you access to everything, plus a free CHGO Red Stars T-shirt. There’s also a deal where you can sign up for a new PointsBet account, and get a year’s subscription for free. You’ll also get all of CHGO’s coverage, including Chicago Sky (Sky in four, babes), Bulls, Bears, White Sox, Cubs, Blackhawks, and Fire.

Here’s to another year of Chicago soccer, in a pivotal Year 10 for the league. Let’s show ‘em what we’re made of.