The Olympics begin in a bit over every week for ladies’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’ ultimate 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 have been No. 29 Mexico and No. 44 Costa Rica.
The outcome: one objective in two video games with just about a first-choice lineup.
If you happen to’re a U.S. ladies’s nationwide crew supporter, this could scare you to loss of life. And it’s not simply the outcome, however the best way that the crew arrived at these outcomes.
As a lot hype because the U.S. ahead line has obtained since Emma Hayes selected the 22-player full roster, the crew has made opposing goalkeepers appear like world-beaters. So many instances, the assault both missed the objective 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 sphere so far 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 ladies’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 feel you might be nonetheless seeing one main flaw in crew chemistry: one of many gamers not taking part in within the NWSL simply occurs to be the crew captain, Lindsey Horan, who performs with Olympique Lyon.
Not like many different U.S. groups previously, this crew typically appears to be like misplaced and discombobulated, not attacking house, not being aggressive by way of 1-v-1 play, and typically not with the ability to work out what to do with that leather-covered bladder out on the sphere.
It might be simple to savage the crew with the identical rhetoric as some have accomplished with the lads’s nationwide facet. And I feel there might be some query as as to whether the present pay-to-play system of ladies’ and ladies’s growth is yielding, within the phrases of Alexi Lalas, “gentle, tattooed millionares.”
As a result of there may be more cash to be made in ladies’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 alternatives galore for the elite ladies’s participant.
However lots of the alternatives solely come from profitable main tournaments, particularly an Olympics. I’m not so certain that our ladies can pull all of it collectively in such a brief time frame. Chemistry, resembling what was discovered with the U.S. groups within the Nineteen Nineties, took years.
