The Olympics begin in a bit over every week for girls’s soccer, because the event will get a few days’ head begin on the remainder of the rivals assembling in France.
As preparation, the US’ remaining prep video games earlier than an Olympics was once the likes of China, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Sweden, and Canada. This 12 months’s sendoff opponents had been No. 29 Mexico and No. 44 Costa Rica.
The consequence: one purpose in two video games with just about a first-choice lineup.
Should you’re a U.S. girls’s nationwide crew supporter, this could scare you to loss of life. And it’s not simply the consequence, however the way in which that the crew arrived at these outcomes.
As a lot hype because the U.S. ahead line has acquired since Emma Hayes selected the 22-player full roster, the crew has made opposing goalkeepers appear like world-beaters. So many occasions, the assault both missed the purpose or hit the goalkeeper.
Too, the U.S. gamers appear to not have the mentality of taking the ball proper to the opposition, ready for them to arrange on protection — to “park the bus,” within the parlance of the sport.
It’s a disgrace that the product on the sector to date within the Emma Hayes period has produced some fairly dismal outcomes. Positive, the crew has spun 4 clear sheets, however towards opposition which is ranked twentieth or decrease within the FIFA world rankings.
It’s a disgrace that this energy outage has come after girls’s soccer in America seemingly was popping out of a darkish interval. Quite a few star gamers had fled the U.S. home league, the NWSL, due to abusive crew cultures on greater than half its groups.
I believe you’re nonetheless seeing one main flaw in crew chemistry: one of many gamers not enjoying within the NWSL simply occurs to be the crew captain, Lindsey Horan, who performs with Olympique Lyon.
In contrast to many different U.S. groups previously, this crew generally appears to be like misplaced and discombobulated, not attacking house, not being aggressive by way of 1-v-1 play, and generally not with the ability to determine what to do with that leather-covered bladder out on the sector.
It will be straightforward to savage the crew with the identical rhetoric as some have finished with the lads’s nationwide aspect. And I believe there might be some query as as to if the present pay-to-play system of ladies’ and girls’s improvement is yielding, within the phrases of Alexi Lalas, “comfortable, tattooed millionares.”
As a result of there may be more cash to be made in girls’s soccer than ever earlier than. You might be listening to tales of switch charges for feminine gamers, such because the $860,000 payment that Bay FC paid for the rights to Racheal Kundananji. There are advertising and marketing alternatives galore for the elite girls’s participant.
However numerous the alternatives solely come from successful main tournaments, particularly an Olympics. I’m not so positive that our girls can pull all of it collectively in such a brief time frame. Chemistry, similar to what was discovered with the U.S. groups within the Nineties, took years.
