In their first ever game at PayPal Park last March, playing in front of a sold out crowd, Bay FC let the emotions of the night get the better of them and sloppily gave up two goals in the final moments to lose 3-2 to the Houston Dash. Now, with an entire season under their belts, the players seem to have learned their lesson.
Against the North Carolina Courage on Saturday, Bay FC star defender Abby Dahlkemper broke the deadlock with a go-ahead goal in the 82nd minute, by throwing her leg at a free-kick. Afterwards, instead of chasing another goal, the home side dug in and defended, preserving a crucial 1-0 win.
“It was just a gritty performance,” Bay FC Head Coach Albertin Montoya said after the game. “It wasn’t our best in the attack, but that wasn’t necessarily the game plan. It was more about being solid defensively and hitting them on the counter.”
Going into the season, Montoya opined that his team needed to be an attacking side that played free-flowing and possession-based soccer in order to succeed. But as the year went on and Bay FC conceded more goals than most of the league, his side eventually embraced a more pragmatic approach against the NWSL’s more talented teams.
Nowhere in the lineup was this more telling than Tess Boade overtaking marquee signing Deyna Castellanos in the advanced midfield position. This year, the 25 year old has started in the second most games on the team (22) and made twice as many appearances as she’s ever had in a career that’s seen her bounce between Carolina and Australia before landing in the Bay Area.
“They have a chip on their shoulder,” Montoya said, when asked about how young Americans like Boade, Kiki Pickett and Alyssa Malonson have cemented themselves in his starting lineup. “They’re talented and I think they just needed to be given the opportunity to show it. Everyone was having a difficult time adjusting at the beginning of the season.”
Against North Carolina, the hosts were out possessed 60 to 40 percent and spent long portions of the game pinned inside their own side of the field.
“Once we defended and won the ball, the key was whether we could keep it,” Montoya explained. “And we weren’t doing that in the beginning of the second half. We were giving the ball away. But we stayed connected and it was just about [the players] believing in themselves again and connecting a few passes.”
The momentum started to turn in Bay FC’s favor once Montoya replaced target striker Asisat Oshoala with the hard-running Rachel Hill in the 66th minute. Afterwards, the hosts proved more lethal on the counter with their pace and won two free kicks outside of the penalty box, with the latter setting up the game-winning goal.
“Fuck yes, that was the moment,” Boade said of her reaction to Dahlkemper’s finish. “Then it became ‘defend for your life.’ ”
By earning three points in the penultimate game of the regular season, Bay FC are now in pole position to clinch a playoff berth two weeks from now when they visit the Dash, who since the start of the year, have traded away their best player, María Sánchez, and plummeted to the bottom of the league table.
A win that day could see Bay FC rise as high as the sixth seed in the standings, depending on how the other teams around them do. A loss, combined with a Racing Louisville win over the San Diego Wave, would drop them out of the playoffs altogether based on goal difference.
The pressure surrounding the game in San Jose was increased when Louisville managed to beat the Portland Thorns 1-0 earlier in the day, which brought them level on points with Bay FC, who were sitting on the league’s final playoff spot, the eighth seed.
“The way the fans showed up tonight, the players just looked at each other and said ‘there’s no way we’re losing this game,’ ”Montoya said. “The players deserved it. We’re finding different ways of winning and that’s what it’s going to take to win once we make the playoffs.”
After the match, Montoya addressed the fans at PayPal Park by saying the team would not be content with only the eighth seed in two weeks. They wanted to finish the season in sixth and next year, even host a playoff game.
“We don’t even use the term expansion team around here,” Boade said. “With the amount of talent [the front office] has assembled here, we absolutely should be contenders, not just in the playoffs. Internally, we know we deserve that.”
“We’re not done yet after today,” she said. “We still have five wins to go.”
Five wins would take them all the way to the 2024 NWSL championship game.
Notebook Dump
1. Since arriving in August in a trade with San Diego, Dahlkemper, 31, a native of Menlo Park, who actually played for Montoya as a teenager, has stabilized Bay FC’s once porous backline alongside NWSL veteran Emily Menges. “This team has allowed me to be myself,” Dahlkemper said. “I’m happy off the field and that’s translating to on the field.”
2. This year, the Courage are firmly in the playoff picture as a lock for the fifth seed behind a brilliant campaign by 25 year old playmaker Ashley Sanchez, who was just called into the U.S. Women’s National Team for the first time by Emma Hayes. The former Western New York Flash franchise won back-to-back NWSL championships in 2018 and 2019 before a devastating sexual abuse scandal rocked the organization and league in 2021.
3. The NWSL season will pause again for an international break. Montoya joked that he would have liked to call FIFA himself to cancel its upcoming slate of games, if it meant that his players could immediately follow up on their recent win. Bay FC has one under-the-radar star that just got her first USWNT call up: Alyssa Malonson, who was the the first pick of last year’s expansion draft, and has cemented the left back spot onto her own.
About the Author: Kevin V. Nguyen is a business and sports journalist. He has covered soccer for The Guardian, The Sacramento Bee, and The San Francisco Standard. Follow him on X/Twitter @KevinNguyen_89
