ORLANDO – The Orlando Pride needed some late heroics to avoid going winless on their three-game homestand, and Marta provided just that.
With just four minutes left until stoppage time, Marta scored off an assist from Sydney Leroux to give the Pride a 2-1 win over the Washington Spirit at Orlando City Stadium.
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“I’m really proud of the players tonight,” Pride Head Coach Tom Sermanni said. “It was a really tight game in the end in the scoreline but we had seven good chances to score in the first 12 minutes. It’s important when you get those chances that, if you take one or two of them it gives you that little barrier and a little bit of respite because you know at some stage in this league teams are going to come into the game and they’re going to create chances and that’s exactly what Washington did. They consolidated a little bit and then got that opening goal, which made life obviously a lot more difficult then. The players deserve a lot of praise for coming back, keep plugging away, keep playing the way that we wanted to play and I think we did enough to win the game and we deserved to win the game.”
The Pride lost the previous two games of their homestand, but salvaged one and improved to 7-5-4 on the season.
The Pride fell behind, 1-0, in the 26th minute on a goal by Washington’s Ashley Hatch, but Leroux scored the equalizer in stoppage time at the end of the first half to make it a 1-1 game.
Next up for the Pride is a game at the Houston Dash at 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday.