The USA played qualifiers.
I think it is good for any sport to not have one team that is consistently head and shoulders above the others. Good chance a European team will win this World Cup. Sweden will be tough test for the USA.
I am old enough to remember when men’s hockey was dominated by Canada. We used to send senior men’s teams from small cities to the world championships and win every year with a lot of lopsided scores. Then the Russians, Europeans and Americans developed great hockey players and leagues making it a much more interesting sport.
The Canadian women’s soccer team is in disarray. They are partially blaming the lack of a professional Canadian women’s league for their problems.
Do their players not play anywhere professionally?
Men’s defending champs were last automatically qualified in 2002.
It doesn’t appear that the Women’s defending champs ever automatically qualified.
(Source: wiki)
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Their best players play in European leagues but that still leaves a second tier of Canadian women players that doesn’t have many competitive opportunities. Also a domestic professional league would help develop younger players.
Yes, the criticism is necessary. Stop babying them cuz girls.
However, do note that they were coming in second in the Group with a win less than +5. NED knew what was needed and did it.
These two lay on the criticism thickly:
Lloyd says -
“I’m just seeing a very lackluster, uninspiring, taking-it-for-granted, where winning and training and doing all that you can to be the best possible individual player is not happening.”
There’s your problem. As a follow-on from Kid_Rock’s post, it’s a team sport (can’t just rely on excellent individual skills, unlike in Lloyd’s day) and the Europeans, with a strong professional league, are treating it as such.
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A few of them, actually, and they don’t have any American-style salary caps or shit like that. And, pro/rel, too, in England and France and Spain.
The problem with Carli Lloyd’s criticism isn’t that the team shouldn’t be criticized. It’s that she’s criticizing them for the wrong things. Carli Lloyd played soccer for a very long time at a very high level. Why is she focused on mentality instead of tactics? Listen to what she says here: https://twitter.com/sportingnews/status/1686306096536055808
When she says “It started to shift post-2020…”, remember that Lloyd has always had a problem with the social justice and equality stances that the USWNT has taken. The post-2020 shift she’s talking about is everyone in the program taking a knee at the Olympics after the murder of George Floyd. Well, everyone but her. She blames the current underperformance of the team on them standing for racial & social justice and equal pay.
This is behind a paywall, but good reading:
Could you please paste it?
Here’s the text. Some of the Twitter embeds didn’t paste.
Summary
Minutes after the United States and Portugal mercifully stopped playing soccer, allowing a weary nation to sleep instead of watching the Americans nervously fall over or aimlessly kick the ball out of bounds, the recriminations began. The USWNT had advanced to the round of 16, yes, but they were lucky to escape the match after Portugal outplayed them for 98 minutes and banged the best chance of the game off the post in the 91st minute. When you are defending two straight World Cup titles, tumbling backwards into a date with the team that just spanked you 3-0 at the most recent Olympics is cause for a certain amount of alarm.
The Fox Soccer panel went in on the team’s performance and organization immediately after the game ended, and in one sense, they are the right types of people to have comment on such a performance, as Alexi Lalas and Carli Lloyd are both deeply committed partisans who want to see the team win another World Cup. Both analysts bashed Vlatko Andonovski’s squad for their nervous, dull performance, with Lalas noting that while “there have to be massive changes” on and off the field, the USWNT is still a dangerous team capable of winning the whole tournament. That’s both fairly measured and formulated in response to the 270 minutes of actual soccer played on the field.
On the other hand, Lloyd, a world-class crank, managed an impressive feat of needle-threading, when she sat down to analyze a game where almost everything went wrong and picked one of the few available angles of criticism that was bizarrely unwarranted. She was apoplectic upon seeing the team celebrating with fans after the game. She fumed, “I have never witnessed something like that.”
Lloyd continued, and finally got to what she really wanted to say, which was that the USWNT no longer cares to do the hard work it takes to win because they care about (unspecified) off-field pursuits. Given what we know about Lloyd’s acutely unpleasant vibe, history of criticizing her teammates for having any political stances, and repeated identification of something breaking in the team’s culture in 2020 (not coincidentally, right around when she retired) it’s hard not to read Lloyd’s polemic about various “off-the-field things that are happening” as a thinly veiled rant about wokeness run amok. It’s not quite as blunt as Lloyd saying, Back in my day, CRT only stood for cut, run, and tackle, but this is not really a point about soccer, this is a point about players and the federation caring more about appearances than winning.
Vlatko Andonovski held his press conference after Lloyd criticized his team, and he defended his group. “They’ve put everything they could in preparation for this tournament and every game that they go into, so to question the mentality of this team, to question the willingness to win, to compete, I think it’s insane,” he said. Obviously he is closer to the team than a permanently aggrieved former player, though even Andonovski’s admission that his team didn’t play up to their standard falls short of accurately describing the rotten performance. The team was incapable of any remotely harmonious passages of play, so either the chemistry is off or the coaching is. Alex Morgan can talk all she wants about the team merely missing good chances, but 99 percent of the game is the process of creating those chances and keeping the other team from doing so, and the USWNT was not up to the task.
The silver lining here is that this scrap is taking place after the U.S. advanced, so even without Rose Lavelle, they can redeem their shaky group stage performance with a win against Sweden. If there is anyone to be encouraged by, it’s not the defiant manager nor the cranky former player who ether doesn’t know what she’s talking about or won’t say what she means, it’s veteran Kelley O’Hara, last seen on the pitch leading a big team meeting and lighting the team up for their shaky performance. This seems to me like the attitude of someone who knows how close her team got to oblivion, and what a hard path they have in front of them.
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Thank you.
She’s making a run at FoxNews, I think.
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They might need Ted Lasso to teach them the triangle for soccer.
Imagine getting eliminated with a +5 goal difference.
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….and the team you beat 6-0 advances!
Morocco wins most improved award.
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Morocco, when they found out they were to be first ever Arab nation into the knockout rounds of the Women’s World Cup -
Don’t forget, the game starts 5am tomorrow Eastern, for all those Swedish and American fans out there.
I am not a Swedish nor an American fan but I watched it. Glad I did.