Back to the Portland Timbers Newsfeed

Inside PTFC | The two types of defending that carried Thorns FC to Sunday's clean sheet

There will come a time when we can stop talking about Portland Thorns FC's defense as if it’s floating in solution, in the middle of a petri dish, being passed from microscope to microscope. It’s as if there’s a lab full of grad students in white coats passing around samples, sharing pithy, technical missives about the line’s chemistry and composition. “Fascinating,” they keep saying, as if no grad student had ever used the term, before – as if they’re not something I made up, on the spot, right now.

Nobody talked this much about that Thorns defense in 2016 and 2017, mostly because, back then, the goal prevention was so good.