An unusual loss shows the USWNT might not have its new No. 1 goalkeeper yet

When a team gives up a goal on a corner kick, it’s rarely just down to one person. But when a team gives up two goals on corner kicks in one game, there likely will be alarm bells.

That’s what happened Thursday night at Subaru Park, where the U.S. women were upset by Portugal, 2-1.

Manager Emma Hayes was frustrated afterward, as were many of her players. There are few things — sometimes nothing — a soccer coach dislikes more than giving up goals on set pieces.

Nor did it help that this U.S. squad looked unusually disjointed, even for a group that hadn’t been together in four months and had just two days of practice before kickoff.

“I didn’t recognize us,” Hayes said. “ I felt that we just rushed everything. We went direct. We didn’t look like the team that we’ve been working on, but that’s what happens when you got 113 days apart.”

She admitted she had “felt it the last two days in training,” seeing “so many misconnections, just taking a bit of time for us to get on the same page.”

And she offered a few of the rhetorical flourishes that have long made her popular among fans and players.

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“Sometimes you need a kick up the back side like that,” she said at one point.

“I was frustrated this evening because it felt like a game of Whac-a-Mole,” she said at another. ”I felt like I put something out, and then I was whacking that — that’s how the game felt for me as a coach. And I’ve been doing this for so long, I hate them games.”

Hayes wasn’t going to pick at individual players or positions, to no surprise. She knew, though, that the U.S. team’s decades of success have also earned it the right to be criticized, and she usually doesn’t mind that when it’s warranted.

There will be questions about the centerbacks and forwards. The latter certainly falls under Hayes’ remark that “there’s so many decisions we made” that felt like the wrong one.

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“I’m like, ‘Is it the right moment to take a shot? Slip a player in?’” she said. “No, we didn’t make those decisions.”

And from up in the press box, there were questions about a position that has faced several lately.

For much of the night, goalkeeper Phallon Tullis-Joyce didn’t play badly. She was credited with two saves, the best of which was a close-range stop on Tatiana Pinto after a misplay by U.S. centerback Tara McKeown.

But Tullis-Joyce didn’t look good on either of those corners.

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Again, neither solely were her fault. On the first, Diana Gomes jumped amid three U.S. players to win the header and knocked it low, beating Tullis-Joyce on the bounce.

The second was off an outswinging corner that Tullis-Joyce wouldn’t have gotten to in any circumstance, and Fatima Pinto’s shot bounced off two U.S. players. So it’s nitpicking to say Tullis-Joyce’s reaction time wasn’t ideal. But the standard is high, and it felt like just enough to plant a seed of doubt.

“Those were tough to take on the chin,” Tullis-Joyce said.

Asked about her play on those corner kicks, she said: “They had some driven corners into that back post area. I’m sure I’ll take a look at the clips afterward to see whether or not maybe I could play a bigger role in that, but that’s just for me to look and review afterward.”

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Hayes likely will stick with Tullis-Joyce as her new No. 1 goalkeeper for a while. The 29-year-old New Yorker has generally played well for the U.S., and is playing quite well at club level for England’s Manchester United.

Still, we’ll see if anyone else gets minutes over the next two games during Sunday’s rematch vs. Portugal (4 p.m., TNT, Universo) — coincidentally Alyssa Naeher’s retirement tribute — and Wednesday’s game vs. New Zealand in Kansas City (8 p.m., TNT, Universo).

Current No. 2 Claudia Dickey presumably would be first in line for that shot. And if after that, Aubrey Kingsbury leads the Washington Spirit on a second straight run to the NWSL title game, there might be some clamor for her to get a call-up for the first time since June of last year.

Otherwise, the blame was spread around.

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“It felt really individual out there,” said midfielder Rose Lavelle, who scored the U.S.’s goal just 33 seconds after kickoff. “I think everyone was trying to maybe fix it on their own. That’s something that, when the going gets tough, we’ve got to make sure we’re sticking together, playing together.”

Sam Coffey was particularly miffed about conceding on those corner kicks. Asked how she’d assess the plays, she responded promptly: “Obviously, we got scored on them, so I wouldn’t assess them very high.”

She credited Portugal, and rightly so. Though the Navegadoras are No. 23 in FIFA’s global rankings, they’ve got more talent than a few teams ahead of them — as they showed in tying reigning European champion England in February, then Italy at this summer’s Euros.

Those results are more telling than the one that naturally stuck in many American fans’ minds Thursday night, the scoreless tie Portugal pulled against the U.S. at the 2023 World Cup.

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But Coffey saved most of her words for her own side, which also was the right move.

“I think whether we’re not locked in enough in those moments or we’re not doing good enough in our man-marking or being alive for a second phase [when a ball is recycled after being cleared], I think that’s an area we’ve always prided ourselves on, and that was not up to our standard tonight,” she said. “Set pieces win championships, win games. And for them to capitalize on those and win the game that way, I think is really disappointing for us, and we have to be better.”

It is obviously better to lose in an off-year friendly than in an actual tournament. And on top of any loss lighting a spark under this group, they know they’ll see the same team again a couple days.

“The lucky thing for us is we have a second shot at this,” Lavelle said. “There’s no months of time between the next time we can maybe get better from this loss. So we have three days to turn around and show up better.”

Tullis-Joyce was even more blunt: “Revenge, for sure.”

It will no doubt get attention, as this team always does.