I’m not going to defend a player for kicking another player off the ball. Such kicking is against the rules, as we all know.
Nonetheless, Meghan Klingenberg’s 14th-minute foul against Allie Long this Saturday, and the resulting discourse and possible post-hoc suspension, strikes an emotional chord that rings perfectly true with how this season has gone.
For a player who has, as Kling did until Saturday, three career yellow cards, to commit that particular foul, the level of frustration has to be pretty high. That frustration foreshadowed the feeling in the dying minutes of Saturday’s game, when after containing Megan Rapinoe for 88 minutes, Ellie Carpenter let one well-placed cross slip past to find an unmarked Jodie Taylor.