The Orlando Pride return to NWSL action on Friday night, traveling north to face Racing Louisville FC and aiming to grab three points following a lengthy international break.<\/p>\n
The Pride (2-1-2, 8 points) take on Louisville (0-3-1, 1 point) at Lynn Family Stadium at 5:30 p.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s strange, but the way that we\u2019re doing it is just focusing on chunks at a time, and it\u2019s important to get those two weeks off after such a fast start to get the mental right and to get our bodies right,\u201d Orlando forward Julie Doyle said. \u201cIt was nice to have that break to fine-tune the things we needed improvement on, but it\u2019s nice to have the group back as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Orlando hasn\u2019t played a league match since April 3, leaving the coaching staff to balance fitness levels and shake off any lingering rust. Friday\u2019s match kicks off a critical stretch of the schedule. The Pride need to find their rhythm quickly and stack up points before the league pauses again for the summer World Cup break.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst five games, you don\u2019t want to be perfect. You don\u2019t want to be\u2026 peaking at a moment. You always want to continuously improve,\u201d Orlando head coach Seb Hines said. \u201cWe found areas that we can improve on. We\u2019ve had a good first five games, but we like winning, and we want to win every game that\u2019s in front of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Racing Louisville presents a prime opportunity for Orlando to spark its offense. Louisville enters the match winless in its first four games, having already allowed 10 goals this year. For an Orlando attack trying to get back on the same page after weeks apart, Friday offers a chance to test a leaky defense and get comfortable in the final third again.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey always give us a tough game, especially away from home,\u201d Doyle added. \u201cThey\u2019re always aggressive, direct and physical. We have to match that\u2026 but we also have to play possession-style soccer and stick to what we do well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Following Friday\u2019s road test, the Pride return home to face the Washington Spirit on May 2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Orlando Pride return to NWSL action on Friday night, traveling north to face Racing Louisville FC and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[28,1335,139,141,140,3968,2062,76046,110],"class_list":["post-243460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-florida","tag-orange-county","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-orlando-pride","tag-soccer","tag-social-sports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}