Happy first day of June, and first day of Pride Month! Hopefully your Memorial Day festivities were enjoyable, because the soccer weekend was…not. Let’s talk about it.

North Carolina Courage 5, Racing Louisville 0

That’s what is commonly referred to in the biz as a “shellacking.” Racing was thoroughly overrun by the Courage in the second half. North Carolina, at some points in the match, were scoring just for fun. Racing gave up 28 shots after surrendering 26 the week before against Washington, 11 of which were on target. A 50% conversion rate is bad enough, and much worse when the number of shots is that high.

The Courage also completed 85% of their 500 passes, and only had to clear seven balls the entire match.

This game was probably a bit of a course correction for both clubs. The Courage were much better with Sam Mewis in the lineup, and this is the kind of performance you’d expect from a team expected to be the class of the league. Racing, meanwhile, weren’t able to suffer the same barrage of shots and possession unscathed two weeks in a row, and some chickens came home to roost, as they say.

There’s not much else to say about this game, other than Racing were overwhelmed by a much better team. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from a game like this by all parties involved at Racing. Let’s hope the learning happens and our women in lavender come out better this weekend against another very tough opponent in Portland Thorns.

Louisville City 1, Indy Eleven 2

Corben Bone’s first half tally in stoppage time should have been enough, but some sloppy defending against Indy’s counter-attacks in the second half led to two converted penalties for Eleven and that’s how the game ended. This is a game we should all be familiar with by now: City dominates possession, shots, shots on target, passes, forced clearances, etc., and loses because of defensive mistakes early in the season. It happens every year. It is sooo annoying.

One recipe, of course, is to just score more goals, which City were trying to do by pressing more numbers high defensively. The consequence of that, of course, is getting hit on the counter, which only got scarier as the second half wore on. Part of me thinks City should have just ceded possession to Indy after their opening goal and seen what they’d do with it. Indy only had five shots all game, and the only two that were even on target were the penalty attempts. However, that goes against just about everything this group has ever stood for or trained for, and so it goes.

Dropping points in an important home stand is bad, make no mistake. Let’s not forget that late in the season, Morados are away a LOT. Winning home games now makes it more tolerable to drop points away later. Unfortunately, City’s drawn Birmingham and lost to Indy in two of its first four matches at LFS this season.

Despite the super-long preseason, this team does not quite yet look like the finished article. City look like a team struggling to score. They’ve given up three penalties in four games. They’re conceding a lot of fouls and average three yellow cards per game. Injuries to key players obviously does not help, and losing City’s best player so far this season in Jonathan Gomez to Mexico for a few weeks doesn’t, either. But this is something that needs to be worked out soon.

Gemma Bonner is finally in town!

In better news, the former Manchester City defender got in town just in time to catch the Indy game last weekend and is finally training with her Racing teammates. That’s good! Now we need Ebony Salmon to get here and Taylor Otto to immediately recover and become the best central midfielder in the world and we’ll be getting somewhere.