What has made that seven-year absence from the NWSL Championship game all the more difficult for fans of the Reign to swallow – if not those involved with the club itself – has been the success of its biggest rival.
No team in NWSL history has won more Championship titles than the Portland Thorns – and the Reign hate the Thorns. The feeling is mutual, too. In fact, when the Championship game took place at Portland’s Providence Park in 2015, fans of the Thorns showed up in numbers to cheer Kansas City on to victory over the Reign. “This actually was the moment that made me realize the rivalry,” Jocelyne Houghton, one of the vice-presidents of the Royal Guard, the Reign supporters’ group, told GOAL earlier this year.
Portland won the first ever NWSL Championship title in 2013 and triumphed in both 2017 and 2022, too. The club also has two Shields in its trophy cabinet, from 2016 and 2021, and a Challenge Cup. Oh, and it knocked the Reign out of the playoffs in 2018.
“From a significance point of a friend, I’m incredibly proud and happy for Pinoe to have this type of send-off and I hope we really f*ck it up this weekend,” Meghan Klingenberg, the Thorns defender who won the 2015 Women’s World Cup alongside Rapinoe, said ahead of the forward’s final trip to Portland in September. “We don’t give a f*ck that Megan Rapinoe is coming to town and it’s her last game [here].”
Christine Sinclair, the Thorns captain, echoed the sentiment, albeit with a quote requiring fewer asterisks. “I’m going to miss playing against her, this rivalry is going to miss having her and our fans are going to miss booing her,” she said.
Rapinoe has done her fair share to help the Reign get one over on Portland in the past decade, but never for a prize bigger than bragging rights. If the pair were to meet in the 2023 playoffs, it would be in the Championship game. What an incredible way to close her career that could be.
It’s not just Rapinoe’s retirement that makes success for the Reign a narrative that some of the neutrals will get behind in these playoffs, either. Alongside the USWNT icon for the past 11 years have been both Fishlock and Lauren ‘Lu’ Barnes, the latter a true model of consistency for the club and the former, as a Wales international, one of the NWSL’s greatest ever imports. Both have also played a huge part in those incredible Reign teams that have dazzled fans and come so close to the ultimate glory.
“I think that being able to spend 11 years and a long part of my career, a lot of my prime, I’m even extending that right now because I’ve still been doing well, it’s just fun to be able to do it with people like Lu and Pinoe,” Fishlock told Indivisa earlier this year.
“It really is a gift to be able to go through all of this with two of the same kind of people who have just pushed you, hold you to a higher level, hold you to a higher standard and make sure that you don’t drop. All of that together is why the longevity has stayed there.”
The sight of the three ‘OGs’ sat together in a press conference after Rapinoe’s send-off game in October, wearing matching sunglasses, laughing and joking about the idea of Rapinoe paying into a retirement fund and the last of Barnes and Fishlock to hang up their boots getting to collect it, perfectly captured the essence of the camaraderie they have built up over the past decade.
“These are really special moments,” Barnes said of Rapinoe’s final weeks with the club. “I don’t think we ever took it for granted in our 11 years here, one bit. That’s how Pinoe lives, right? She lives in that joy and for those moments and she pushes us to also do that.”
Barnes and Fishlock might have further opportunities beyond this season, but 2023 will be the last chance for this trio to win a Championship together.