US Women's national team manager Emma Hayes has been on a cross-country NWSL road trip,

and we thought it might be fun to look at the games that she saw through her eyes.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's edition of The Late Sub, presented by Ally Bank.

I am your host, Claire Watkins.

It is Wednesday, May 13th, and we've had some exciting NWSL games so far, but I want to talk about what we've seen the last couple of weeks through the context of Hayes' visits to five games, high performers, people who struggled, some of these bubble players who may have been happy to get a look from the U.S. boss and more. Let's just go ahead and dive right in.

So another week, another excellent slate of NWSL games, but what I want to talk about this week is a really interesting through line, and I'm not the only person to identify

this, but I think it's a very cool lens to look at the last couple of weeks of NWSL games, which is to talk about USMS national team head coach Emma Hayes' trip through the NWSL, through the United States, for a little bit over two weeks. It was basically from April 29th to May 9th very well publicized cross-country

trip she was doing appearances in addition to going to these games it was kind of

broadcast out to people before it even happened this is very much Emma Hayes on tour

both were some US soccer business interests they just opened a huge facility in

Atlanta but also this this sort of common practice when you do have

time in between international periods to take a look at how players are doing in the NWSL and I'm

sure abroad as they have sort of this extended time. This is kind of the meat, the meat on the bones of

the U.S. job, which is that you only get so much time with players in camp and how they are

conducting themselves at the club level is very important, even just beyond probably what you see

between the lines. So here are, we're going to start with just the games that Hayes attended,

how they went. We're going to talk about some of the players she saw, some of the players she

didn't see, and how they did. So Hayes attended San Diego's three two win over Denver,

Utah's three nil win over Seattle, Utah's one nil win over Angel City, Portland's two

nil win over San Diego, and Gotham's one one draw with Boston. And we're going to over-analyze this. With the outside

information, we're going to see, you know, she said on her social media that she wants to hit

every market this year. I think actually that was a very important sort of moment for her

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