Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

It is hard to believe that the calendar has already flipped to August.

Trade deadlines have come and gone, transfer windows are ticking, and football—the American kind—looms.

Ask me and I’ll tell you it’s the Dog Days of Summer. Ask my wife and she’ll tell you that fall has started.

Plenty of soccer to cover, including a match between two firmly upper-table teams and some pictures that I got drenched in order to get to you.

As always, feel free to either read through or flip around as you see fit!

Here’s the Table of Contents.

Table of Contents

• Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

  • The Most Curious Thing This Week: Wave Douse Spirit's Attacking Spark

  • The Photo Bay

    • "We Mustn't Forget That It's Been Raining": Best Rainy Snaps

    • Pregame Pour: Weather Changes at a Moment's Notice

    • For Taylor, For Alex, and All Those Fighting Cancer

    • ¡Viva Colombia!: Luisa Agudelo Sees a Slice of Home

  • Something Good I Ate: Potato Ice Cream

And here’s Peach, who, at least by her official documents, is now a teenager after celebrating her official birthday on Saturday!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s the extremely wet showdown between two teams who have spent most of the season near the top of the NWSL standings: the Washington Spirit and the San Diego Wave. 

San Diego became the first road team to take three points against the Spirit at Audi Field since Portland did it on opening night in March. And they did it by forcing the Spirit to adapt to the game San Diego sought to play.

There was only one sequence in the entire game that netted the Spirit a shot on target, and it came on a pair of shots in quick succession near the end of the first half.

The pouring rain was a very visible factor in the Spirit’s struggles to get anything going, but a lot of it came down to the Wave being able to dominate the midfield and quickly have a defender on a Spirit player before they had the chance to move the ball around.

“If you look at it from a field tilt perspective, I really think we pushed Washington deep down and played the game on our terms and not theirs,” San Diego head coach Jonas Eidevall said postgame.

“We limited them almost the whole game to two opportunities. We would have liked to create a little bit more ourselves. That’s sort of like the missing piece of the performance.”

It took an hour for anyone to score, but rookie midfielder Lia Godfrey was able to deliver the lone, albeit deciding blow, after San Diego’s Trinity Byars was able to get to a ball meant for the Spirit’s Sofia Cantore and found Godfrey a step ahead of Washington’s Rebeca Bernal.

“It was a great transition opportunity from us, a fast attack, and the ball was bouncing in the box, and I saw an opportunity to just chip it over the keeper, and thankfully, it went in,” Godfrey said.

On the other side of the play, Spirit center back Tara Rudd, who was caught on her back foot as Byars slipped the ball in to Godfrey, seemed loath to spend more than a moment talking about it.

“Sofia, I think, won her challenge there. And it took a bad deflection, went behind me, and then she scored,” Rudd said.

While the rain slowed up a bit for most of the second half, the pouring rain looked like it may have caused a bit of a slower approach from both teams. And this proved to be a game where one sequence made all the difference.

“I don’t think it’s, like, one they necessarily earned,” fellow Spirit center back Esme Morgan said, “but neither team created a lot of chances, so it was a game that was going to fall in a moment like that.”

In the moments after their loss, though, Morgan was one of multiple Spirit players who noted that there were plenty of shortcomings that would have been a problem for them in any conditions.

“I think we were just a little bit flat, a little bit wasteful, once we got into good positions in the final third,” Morgan said.

Spirit winger Paige Metayer said it was more of a passing problem than a weather problem. 

“The conditions, they, honestly, probably weren’t as much of a factor as we’d like to blame them on, to be honest. Like the conditions were actually pretty good. But, yeah, I think we just need to be crisper with our passes, trying to find those pockets within the lines, recognizing when they’re jumping and when they’re not. I think that all of those things could have been better today.”

Metayer also split it up between how the Spirit did on the ball vs. on defense.

“When we had the ball, it was definitely more of an ‘us’ problem. I think we needed to be sharper. I think we needed to be more creative with how we were breaking them down. I think defensively, they posed some issues by overloading the middle and sending a lot of numbers there that we had difficulties adjusting to.”

Eidevall identified the same issue—sending more players into the central midfield to create a numbers advantage—as a tactic he hoped would break down the Spirit’s defense.

“It’s both teams who want to have possession of the ball. And we also know that Washington is a team that likes to press high. So for us, it was really important to try to create some dilemmas for their wide forwards when they were jumping and pressing so we could play them away. And we did that today by overloading them centrally, and then that requires us to be brave,” Eidevall said. 

The Spirit close their final three-game week of the season with six points out of a possible nine, and have six days between games, as they’ll be back at home on Saturday against North Carolina.

San Diego heads onward as part of an East Coast swing, as they’ll face new league leaders Gotham FC in New Jersey on Friday.

The Photo Bay

There were not as many game photos for me to pick from, sad to say, because the rain was so bad that it made me trek to the press box for a dry spot to watch the game, and also made my camera stop working for big portions of the afternoon.

That being said, I did get a handful of in-game shots and a lot from pregame, so let’s look at what came out.

“We Mustn’t Forget That It’s Been Raining”

One of the funniest soccer fan interviews I have ever seen is one from a few years ago of an incredibly delusional Arsenal superfan making as many excuses as he can for his favorite club.

In trying to defend a terrible defensive performance, he said, “we mustn’t forget that it’s been raining.” 

The interviewer cuts him off, absolutely baffled, and asks “It’s been raining? Are you being serious? It’s raining for both teams!”

It was very hard to forget that it was raining during Sunday’s game, as these pictures of Trinity Rodman, Ludmila, Gabby Carle and Kennedy Wesley show here.

Pregame Pour

More about the rain here, since I cannot tell you enough how quick and extreme the shift was. As bench players walked out, it was a cloudy day. As the last bench players trickled out, the first drops came down. Within about two minutes, when the starting lineups walked out, it was absolutely pouring.

Compare these two pictures, taken three minutes apart.

Here is San Diego Wave head coach Jonas Eidevall, among the last people other than the starters to walk out. Timestamp on this is 4:05 pm, and take note. You can maybe see one or two rain drops in this shot.

Now look at this shot, with a timestamp of 4:08 pm, just three minutes later, of Spirit keeper Sandy MacIver walking out.

Notice any difference?

The reactions I caught in the rain really ran the gamut.

Some folks, like Rebeca Bernal and Hal Hershfelt, were having a great time.

Others, like Leicy Santos, seemed fine with it.

And then there’s Gabby Carle, who… well, embodies how I felt about being caught in the pouring rain.

For Taylor, and Alex, and All Those Fighting Cancer

Sunday also marked the Cancer Awareness Day that the Spirit held. It was an emotional affair, with several fans marking their recovery by having their “ringing the bell” moments on the field during halftime. 

One young fan, nine-year-old Taylor McLeod, has navigated a leukemia diagnosis that she received late last year. Taylor has received eleven blood transfusions in the less-than-nine months since being diagnosed. A few weeks ago, in a partnership between the Spirit and Children’s National, she had the chance to join the Spirit for one of their trainings and on Sunday, she walked out alongside her favorite player, Trinity Rodman, and served as the team’s honorary captain. 

Both before and after the game, it looked like the two of them were having a great time, with Taylor still hanging out with Rodman in the tunnels well after the final whistle. Those of us who were interviewing Spirit players could see the two celebrating the occasion. 

And on the field, not even the rain could wash away the two massive smiles they shared.

The battle against cancer also unfolded in the crowd, as the Spirit Squadron marked the day by standing up for one of their own, Alex Da Silva, a regular in the supporters’ section who has often served as a “capo,” leading the section in chants.

Alex was diagnosed with a different, rare form of leukemia on June 30^th , and in the weeks since, he has had a community of loved ones supporting him every step of the way.

Members of the Spirit Squadron wore ribbons, shirts, and even QR codes to show their support for their friend and teammate.

If you would like to support Taylor and Alex on their recovery journeys, the links to their GoFundMe campaigns are here and here, respectively.

¡Viva Colombia!

Visiting goalkeepers warm up right by one of the largest photo bays Audi Field has to offer. And at one point San Diego’s backup keeper Luisa Agudelo, a 19-year-old rookie from Colombia who already has a few NWSL starts to her name, came over for a ball.

She noticed that one of the TV camera operators was wearing a Colombia jersey and was clearly quite excited to spot a slice of home a long way from both Colombia and San Diego.

Something Good I Ate

I have no recent pictures of food, so let’s go back to the summer of 2016, when I took a road trip across America with my college roommate and dear friend.

As we worked our way back from the West Coast, we drove up toward Yellowstone and passed through Idaho. Our midday break was a pit stop at the Idaho Potato Museum in the town of Blackfoot.

The museum, set in a converted former railroad depot, documents the history of the potato and its journey from its origins as a plant in South America to Europe, Africa, Asia and back around to North America and its rise as a common American food item and arguably the most famous thing associated with the state of Idaho.

Among the joys of the Potato Museum included a large diorama you could look down into that showed a den with a couch, a TV, and a family of couch potatoes (the family on the couch was depicted as literal potatoes.)

You could see the world’s largest potato crisp, a giant Pringle donated by Procter and Gamble on behalf of its Pringles brand.

You could (and from what I can tell still can) get “free taters for out-of-staters.” If you tell the museum that you came from beyond Idaho, you get a free potato product. If I remember right, mine was some instant cheesy potato mix.

But the good thing I ate at the Idaho Potato Museum was ice cream. Specifically, an ice cream potato made of, you guessed it, potato ice cream.

The ice cream was not actually potato-flavored. It was vanilla ice cream that, I believe, incorporated a bit of potato in the mixing process, covered with cocoa powder to make it look like a potato, then topped with whipped cream and some chocolate shavings to have it somewhat resemble a loaded baked potato.

You might find it hard to believe, or even think it sounds disgusting, but honestly it was just vanilla ice cream with some whipped cream and chocolate on it. It was pretty good.