Sky Blue FC defeated the Philadelphia Independence 2-0 on Saturday at Yurcak Field to snap Philadelphia’s six game winning streak. Casey Nogueira scored a brace to lead Sky Blue FC to victory.
Elsewhere, the Atlanta Beat and magicJack tied 0-0 on Saturday. Newly appointed player-coach Abby Wambach played 74 minutes before being replaced by Lisa De Vanna. Christie Rampone went the full 90, but Shannon Boxx and Hope Solo were still MIA for magicJack.
The team happiest with these results? The Western New York Flash. Philadelphia (8-3-3, 27 pts.) now has two games in hand and just a one point lead on the Flash (8-2-2, 26 pts.), which plays at Boston tomorrow (6 p.m. on Fox Soccer). The result, combined with magicJack yet again dropping points, also means that the middle of the table remains clustered. Sky Blue FC and magicJack sit on 16 pts., while Boston currently has 15 pts.
Atlanta reported an attendance of 9,345 fans for Saturday’s game. That’s the third-largest single game crowd in WPS history, which comes just four days after the league record was broken in Rochester, N.Y., when 15,404 fans turned up for magicJack and Abby Wambach’s visit to Western New York. That means three of the top five all-time WPS single game crowds are from 2011 (8,076 turned up on May 22 for magicJack’s first visit to WNY). There’s some optimism, if anyone was looking for some.
Alarmingly, there were only 1,593 at Yurcak Field on Saturday. In a time of record crowds and unprecedented media attention on WPS, Sky Blue FC clearly did not get an attendance bump from the Women’s World Cup. That’s a serious, serious problem. Numbers like the ones in Rochester on Wednesday and Atlanta on Saturday will not be sustained, but to not even get the initial bump is scary for Sky Blue FC.
