The Wait Is Over

Buh-Bye

Dalen Cuff: Lifetime's coverage of the NWSL has brought us to Century Link Field in Seattle for the first match of the season between the Reign and their bitter rivals from the south, the Portland Thorns. Good afternoon, I'm Dalen Cuff. If you have been asleep or away from your television or the Internet over the past twenty-four hours, you've missed a real roller coaster of announcements. We will get into the ramifications of all of it in a second, but first here are the facts. Yesterday afternoon, The North Carolina Courage and the Washington Spirit completed a six-player trade that sent Canadian international Sabrina D'Angelo and US National Team members Christina Gibbons and Taylor Smith to DC for goalkeeper Kelsey Wys, defender Kassey Kallman, and midfielder and vice captain Tori Huster. By the end of the evening, Courage head coach and general manager Paul Riley had been dismissed for "conduct detrimental to the franchise". Joining me now is Senior Writer and NWSL Editor for FourFourTwo, Richard Farley. Rich, bring us up to speed on what happened and why Riley was shown the door after pulling off what seems to be a reasonably good trade looking ahead to next year.

Richard Farley: As you said, the trade seems on the surface to be a solid one given Riley's propensity for jettisoning national team players ahead of major competitions. He moved two players that are near-locks to be playing in next year's World Cup and a player that is probably right on the bubble to join them. In exchange, they got a solid goalkeeper, a reliable left back, and an experienced defensive midfielder, all three of whom have played together in one form or another for more than a decade at the college and professional levels. So why did the ownership in Cary send Riley packing? The team is up for sale and this move probably lowered the value of the franchise by a solid couple hundred thousand dollars or more, which means the price for acquiring the club by way of the new rule passed at last week's Owners' Meeting dropped by probably close to half a million dollars. The trade was good for the team, but bad for the franchise as a whole. The owners refused my request for an interview, but I was able to get in touch with Washington GM Lori Lindsey, who told me that due to pending business regarding the trade, neither she nor Spirit President Becky Sauerbrunn could comment on what transpired. I did get a couple of comments from Wys, however, and it seems as though this trade took most of the week to come together, starting as a swap of the two goalkeepers with an additional player heading to the Courage and finishing with what we saw yesterday.

Dalen: Can you explain to our viewers how a completed trade can still have pending business?

Richard: Usually that means that one of the players acquired will be sent on to a third team at a later date. In the case of this trade, the player in question is probably Christina Gibbons, since Smith wasn't part of the transaction until the very end and D'Angelo was always the player that Riley wanted to move, especially after Sammy Jo Prudhomme shut out the LA Olympias last Saturday. Whoever the player is that will be moving on will most likely be scratched for tonight's game against the Courage in order to not risk injury to her and thus deep-six the future transaction.

Dalen: Thanks for filling in the blanks for us on this. When we return, Jenn Hildreth and Kate Markgraf will preview the match and we will have the first-half kickoff of this vital six-pointer between these Western Conference rivals, with just one point separating them heading into today's contest.

The first half featured several bone-crushing tackles from the teams' defensive cores, but Portland was able to get on the scoreboard first by way of a Savannah Jordan chip over Haley Kopmeyer and headed into the locker room up 1-0. The Reign clawed their way back into the match in the second half and gave a club-record crowd of 36,827 something to cheer about when Megan Rapinoe's corner kick was headed home by Katie Johnson in the 71st minute. The match ended 1-1, bringing the Thorns level with LA for first in the West ahead of their match later against Chicago.