— The league-leading North Carolina Courage faced the second-to-last-place Washington Spirit for the third time this season Wednesday night. Playing for the season sweep, Courage manager Paul Riley sought to find a new way to motivate his team heading into the final third of the NWSL season.

“I told the players before the game that there are eight games left [in their NWSL season], and we play each team once,” Riley said. “Treat this as a different season. We’re starting off the season as eight games, and treat it like that.”

The Courage took a half to commit Riley’s admonition to heart, then cruised to a workmanlike 2-0 victory over the Spirit, extending the Courage’s NWSL lead.

After probing for 12 minutes, the Courage got on the board when McCall Zerboni sent a soaring ball over the top that could have been meant for either a streaking Lynn Williams or Debinha in behind the Spirit’s back line. Williams caught up to the service first, then centered the ball to Debinha in the goalmouth. After the sphere squibbed off of Washington’s Whitney Church, all Debinha was left to do was guide it over the goal line for the early 1-0 advantage.

The Courage kept knocking at the door through the opening half, holding nearly 55 percent of possession. But the Courage repeatedly sought to break their defenders down off the dribble in lieu of putting balls in the box. It was a laudable strategy, but while Crystal Dunn got off two near-misses, the one-goal lead held through intermission.

North Carolina nearly doubled its lead in the 55th minute. A long angled ball over the top by Merritt Mathias found Williams, who tipped the ball wide of Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Bledsoe before scampering to the endline in time to get off an angled shot. Bledsoe recovered quickly enough to make a tremendous diving save against the near post.

The Courage finally found their second goal five minutes later. Taking a lay-off from Dunn towards the left wing, Jessica McDonald drove lateral before uncorking a left-footed shot that deflected off Church, sending it on a parabola that looped over Bledsoe and into the net for McDonald’s sixth goal this season, one shy of Dunn’s team lead.

“I saw Crystal Dunn dribbling up the middle,” McDonald said. “She had time and space, and she could have taken the shot. Lynn Williams was on the other side, and I curled out to the other side. She had both of us as options, so she ended up playing me a short pass. I took the defender on 1-v-1, cut inside, and took the shot as soon as I had the opportunity, and it went in.”

Did it clip off Church? “It sure did,” McDonald deadpanned.

Abby Dahlkemper suffered a cut to the mouth in the 84th minute that required a visit to Ferdie Pacheco for a couple of minutes. The Courage held serve, getting to full-time just in time to avoid lightning encroaching on the area.

Wednesday’s defeat extends the Spirit’s winless skid to eight games, a span lasting since May 23. Nevertheless, after the match, Jim Gabarra sounded like a manager who earned a well-planned result instead of another loss.

“I’m extremely proud of my team,” Gabarra said. “We came in with a different tactic tonight, and they executed it perfectly outside of a couple of freakish goals. We were trying to get to the end of the game and conserve our legs and push more numbers forward at the end to get a point or win out of here. I think our team did really well and defended really well. We just weren’t patient enough to get chances in the first half. Nevertheless, when you come here and face this team on full week’s rest, it’s always a difficult ask.”

Gabarra said his team’s strategy was to sit with an extra center back that would hopefully allow the Spirit’s wide players to get forward a little more.

“It’s no secret [the Courage] struggle against a tough block, and if you sit back try to let them play through numbers they don’t have an answer for it,” he said. “If you open yourself up to transition and try to be athletic with them and play an up-and-down game, they’ll slaughter you … You have to make a choice. You can’t come in here and play their game and try to press them with a thin roster and on short rest.”

Riley was wise to the Spirit’s act, one he’s seen regularly replicated by other opponents. He’s also aware that his team needs to be better combat changing defenses.

“[Washington] didn’t exactly chase the game, either,” Riley said. “These other teams are sitting in against us. They tried to clog us in the midfield, and we need to get better finding ways around the clog and getting into wider areas.”

Riley and McDonald agreed that tonight wasn’t the Courage’s best performance, particularly at the outset of the match.

“At first it was a little slow for our liking, so we wanted to pick it up in the second half,” McDonald said. “In the first half we had a little control of the game, but we were also going at a slower pace than normal. In the second half, we wanted to bring it to a higher pace. We did that, and it was nice to get the clean sheet.”

“We’re disappointed with the first half,” Riley said. “We didn’t come out with all cylinders going. I had a little go at them at halftime, saying they just had to be better and more consistent. We got a grip on the game in the second half.”

The Paul Riley wrinkle of the match was Heather O’Reilly getting her first Courage start at left back, in place of an injured Jaelene Hinkle. O’Reilly, a long-time midfielder, had trained all of three minutes at left back during training this week. That was the extent of her preparation for Wednesday’s run out.

“I think [Hinkle] will be ready for the weekend, so we figured that if could get 90 minutes out of HAO tonight, then we could go with [Hinkle] this weekend,” Riley said. “At one point we thought about pulling her, but when Taylor Smith backed off a little bit in the second half, HAO didn’t have to do too much. If Taylor had kept going like she did in the first half, we probably would have made the change. But HAO stuck in there.”

The Courage (13-3-1, 42 pts.) further extends its NWSL lead to 16 points over Seattle. North Carolina next travels to the last-place Sky Blue FC this Saturday, July 14 before visiting the Utah Royals, their 2018 nemesis, on Friday, July 20.

In the meantime, Riley will take solace in the O’Reilly’s description of her and the Courage’s performance tonight. “She goes, ‘It wasn’t that noteworthy’—those were the exact words she used after the game. It wasn’t that noteworthy, but we got it done.”

BOX SCORE

LINEUPS

NC: Rowland, Mathias, Erceg, Dahlkemper, O'Reilly, Zerboni, O'Sullivan, Debinha (Speck, 88’), L. Williams, McDonald (Mewis, 65’), Dunn (Hamilton, 71’)

WAS: Bledsoe, T. Smith (Eubanks, 85’), E. Johnson, Church, Dydasco, Dougherty Howard (Solaun, 73’), Quinn, Huster, Sullivan, Banini (Lavelle, 69’), Hatch

GOALS

NC: Debinha, 12’; McDonald, 60’ (Dunn)

WAS: ---

CAUTIONS

NC: O’Sullivan, 53’

WAS: ---

EJECTIONS

NC: ---

WAS: ---

ATTENDANCE: 3,409