Posted on 08/06/2023 12:17:46 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
After barely scraping by in group play, the U.S. women’s national team will take on familiar foe Sweden in the round of 16 at the Women’s World Cup.
(Excerpt) Read more at si.com ...
Thank you for the summary! Go Sweden!
Glad the pack of nasty Lesbos lost .
This whole event is a joke .
The American hating bull dyke and her pack of lesbos were crushed by a 7th grade
Dallas Boys soccer team.
And......the lesbians lost.
The SI World Jock Strap and Cup WSWNT Issue.
Tough way to lose.
Credit where credit is due. Sweden is an excellent team. The U.S. had not played well in group stage but they were sharp in this game, with a decided edge in the field. Ordinarily the U.S. would have won this game -- I'll say 2-0, and that's cutting Sweden some slack. The big key was the Swedish goalkeeper, who had a Hall of Fame level game. That happens.
I was reminded of Hope Solo in the Olympic gold medal game against Japan in 2012. Japan had a great team and had just won the 2011 Women's World Cup (in a game the U.S. should have won). The U.S. and Japan were the top two teams in the world. They got a rematch in the 2012 Olympic final. In a reverse of the World Cup storyline, Japan clearly outplayed the U.S., but Solo (who was one of the all-time greats, her alcohol problems off the field notwithstanding) made a series of incredible saves and single-handedly kept the U.S. in the game. It happens. This time it happened for Sweden.
So credit where credit is due.
A point to note, because it shows the Achilles heel of this U.S. team. We now exit the World Cup after four games, and the forwards did not score a goal. Nor did they score on a PK. When they lined up to take the penalties, midfielders took the first three shots for the U.S., and they drilled them. In a surprise, Alyssa Naeher, the U.S. goalkeeper -- who had already made a PK save that should have won the game -- took and drilled a PK herself. The forwards? Megan Rapinoe and Sophia Smith both missed the frame, going high each time. Alex Morgan had already been subbed out for Megan Rapinoe, which was a coaching mistake. Lynn Williams did not take a PK. The final U.S. miss was by Kelly O'Hara, who is dangerous but is still a defender; she hit the side post.
The U.S. forwards did not score at all in this World Cup. This, folks, is a clue.
What is wrong with the U.S. forwards? Glad you asked. The U.S. had won back to back World Cups. Intelligent soccer commentators knew what that meant, but the general press once again used this tournament to demonstrate its invincible ignorance and stupidity. The MSM was full of idiot chatter about how the U.S. was a prohibitive favorite and was seriously underperforming. The reality is that back to back World Cups championships -- as with Germany in 2003 and 2007 -- means that a team has had a golden generation, and the problem with golden generations is that they all age out together. The hardest thing to do in any team sport is to rebuild while staying on top, because there is heavy pressure to stand too long on a pat hand. It's hard to cut players who have been winning championships for the last ten years.
So the problem with the U.S. forwards is straightforward, and it's squarely on the coach. Vladko didn't go deep enough in cleaning house. Several of his roster picks were simply bad calls. After her dismal showing as a sub against Sweden, Megan Rapinoe is the easiest example. Put her politics aside. She's 38 years old. She's been battling injuries the last couple of years. She hadn't played much this season in the NWSL, and she has been missing from the national team roster in most of the 2022-23 friendlies. IMHO, she should not have been on the roster. She was clearly brought back based on past performance, and she came back off the injury list. She was picked on the basis of past performances, and that was clearly a big mistake. She could have won the game against Sweden, but she missed her PK. That's on the coach.
Injuries are the extenuating factor for the U.S. forwards. The team was clearly rebuilding after the 2019 World Cup win (which it entered, per the U.S. custom, as the oldest team in the field), followed by a thoroughly disappointing performance in the 2020 Olympics (when age got exposed). COVID set back the timetable, but the last two years have seen wholesale experimentation. Everyone knew that the strength of the team was now in midfield and that the forwards were a problem. Catarina Macario, a forward, had emerged as the team's top scorer, one of the most dynamic young players in the world, and a lock for this year's roster. She went down with an ACL tear and has not worked her way back. No sooner did she go down that Mallory Swanson finally jelled and exploded as the winger that everyone had expected her to be. In late 2022 and early 2023, she had scored half the national team's goals. She went down in April with a torn patella tendon, in a non-contact injury.
With Macario and Swanson healthy, the U.S. would have had a new golden generation in the making. My crystal ball says the U.S. would have been a solid favorite in this year's World Cup. Without them ... well, you saw what happened.
Injuries are part of the game. Every team gets them. But losing your top two scorers, and two of the best ten strikers in the world, is above and beyond.
I never thought this U.S. team would repeat as champions. First and foremost, the law of averages catches up at some point. After group stage, the World Cup is a high stakes, single-elimination tournament against peer level teams. Even the best team is going to have to dodge a bullet or two. Winning back to back championships means that the U.S. team was coming in with an eight game winning streak against peer level teams. Extending that to twelve was always unlikely. International women's soccer is too well balanced for that.
The U.S., Germany and Sweden entered this year's tournament ranked first, second and third in the world. Germany didn't make it out of group. The U.S. almost didn't make it out of group. Sweden has the advantage of playing in Europe, where there are good teams on every streetcorner; the U.S. suffers from playing through CONCACAF, which is the U.S. and Canada, which is always solid, and then a bunch of Central American and Caribbean teams that don't belong on the same field. (The U.S. men's team has to scramble to get past Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, and T&T; the women's team, no.) Sweden is a legit peer level team and one of the favorites to win it all.
Still, all the U.S. needed to win against Sweden was for the forwards to score one goal, or one PK. They didn't. And that is the problem. Macario and Swanson are still young. Along with Mallory Pugh, they are the future.
That said, the U.S. edge in international women's soccer is eroding, and it will continue to erode. The rest of the world -- outside of Latin America, which seems to be stuck in MachoLand and doesn't support women's sports -- is steadily improving its youth development programs and domestic leagues. At the professional level, the European women's leagues are at parity. East Asia is coming on strong, and Japan is again a contender to win it all. Africa used to be so far behind that it was pitiful, but that was a problem of poverty and the lack of developmental programs, not an absence of potential talent. The African teams have finally broken out of the cellar and surprised everyone this year. This will continue. The U.S. has a huge talent pool because of the depth of women's college soccer, and the NWSL will continue to be one of the world's top leagues. But the rest of the world is catching up. Which is a good thing.
By the way: I HATE "break the plane of the goal" scores that are awarded via instant replay. On Sweden's winning PK, Alyssa Naeher -- who had already saved on PK -- got a hand on the ball and batted it up. It was now a floater right in the goalmouth. She got a second touch on it and cleared it before it hit the ground or the back of the net. The technology clearly showed that the ball had indeed broken the plane of the goal while still in midair. Correct call. But I've hated those kinds of goals ever since television and instant replay took over college football and the NFL. The tv networks now pull the strings and they relentlessly rig the rules to generate cheap scoring. That is why we have wide receivers scoring touchdowns on balls they theoretically "controlled" for 2.7 nanoseconds before the ball slips through their hands. Or runner scoring touchdowns because they are ruled to have "controlled" a fumble for a fraction of a second before losing said fumble in the next instant. This is the soccer equivalent.
Go Sweden!
Their lesbians beat our lesbians.
Are you a pro-sports writer? That was an awesome post.
For those of us who know nothing of soccer, how is it that 13 and 14-year-old boys teams from random schools beat the female pro-soccer players, and that seems to happen around the world, not just in the US?
Also, don't rule out "Retribution", "Karma", "Mojo"... any of those quaint terms that describe the theory that what goes around, ultimately comes around. Sports are a microcosm of life, and when a villain like Megan Rapinoe and her toadies on USWNT lose, it inspires hope not only in one's sports loyalties but also in life at large.
May this also prove true in other, more important matters that are unfolding even now.
Died Suddenly . . .
Sweden knocks USA out of World Cup in penalty kicks
After a scoreless match, Sweden won 5-4 on sudden death penalty kicks.
https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/usa-faces-sweden-world-cup-knockout-round-australia/story?id=102052782
Goodbye Rapinoe ! ! ! !
Actually the Swedish young ladies are now my lesbians of choice to win out. At least by appearance they're happy to be there representing their country. :)
How? Make the experiment yourself. Round up some attractive, 20-something young women and challenge them to walk down city streets in the wrong part of town late at night. Keep stats on the results. I think you will find that the teenage boys have a decisive edge.
The game that the USWNT hecklers always cite was a scrimmage -- it's starting to be more than a few years ago -- against a U-15 Academy team in Houston. U-15 means that the boys were under 15 years of age as of the magical cutoff date. (U.S. Soccer used to use August 1 as the cutoff, in order to more or less match up with the age groups in the schools. In 2015, the date was shifted to January 1, so it's now a calendar basis, which means that club teams and school teams draw from overlapping but not identical cohorts.) I.e., the U-15 teams will consist of players who are turning 16 in the "U-15" season.
The Academy players are the elite players in the top developmental programs. They are typically sponsored by and affiliated with the local professional soccer clubs. They are the U.S. equivalent to the much more extensive European club system, in which the professional leagues sign the top youth players to professional contracts while still in secondary school.
With variations, the same thing is done in other sports. In football and basketball, a lot of money is floating around under the table, and top players are in club programs that are thinly veiled professional development operations. Sometimes the "students" attend specialized "high schools" that are just athletic training mills with some academic window dressing to give them fake diplomas. I don't have much contact with those circles, but some years ago I worked with a woman whose son was an elite hockey player, a goalkeeper, who at age 15 was in close contact all the top college and professional scouts. His "club" team consisted of guys from a quite extended geographical area, who attended what was basically a boarding school, lived with host families during the week, and came home occasionally on weekends. The same sorts of things are done with elite gymnasts, swimmers, and youth athletes in other sports as well. These are the guys who, in football and basketball, are the five star recruits who used to get paid under the table to attend college and who now get NIL money. There's not that much money in U.S. soccer, but give it time. This is how much of the rest of the world develops its pro soccer players.
Anyhow, elite male athletes at that age aren't kids any more. They are all early maturing, which is a huge factor in youth sports where puberty is king. The top athletes at that age are already strapping young adults; most of them are already at their full height, although they will add a lot of muscle in the next few years.
You know. Those guys. The guys the coach at your alma mater is trying to recruit, and the coach just hopes he doesn't get caught cheating.
The elite male athletes at this age are already bigger, faster and stronger than adult women. The top women's teams around the world scrimmage "boys" teams about this age because they want to play stronger opponents. That's how you improve. And if you are the US, or British, or Australian or German women's national team, you already have all the top women players on your squad. Where do you find peer level practice competition? You know the answer.
The women don't scrimmage against men's college teams -- at least not any of the good men's college teams -- because they would get blown off the field. Did Serena Williams practice against men? Yes, of course. Did she ever enter a men's tournament? No. Same principle.
If you've ever seen pictures of the USWNT scrimmage against the U-15 Academy team, you know that the boys were all a head taller and, just from the looks of things, much stronger. At that age, the women could still hang in enough to benefit from the scrimmage. A couple of years later, these guys would all be playing D1 soccer, and the game would have been too lopsided to be useful.
Women's sports are a class based competition. They are playing to be best in class. And that's perfectly legitimate. I have no problem rooting for U.S. women in Olympic track and field, gymnastics, swimming, ice skating, hockey -- and yes, even soccer. Just as I have total respect for lightweight and welterweight boxers and the lower weight classes in weightlifting or wrestling. We don't send women out to compete with men professionally in soccer for the same reason that Sugar Ray Leonard would never have stepped into the ring against Muhammed Ali or George Forman or whoever was the reigning heavyweight of his era. But apparently a lot of freepers think Sugar Ray should be ridiculed because he wasn't "the best," since he didn't fight heavyweights.
The problem is when the women think they should be paid as much as the men.
Now they know how Oppenheimer feels when it got beat out by blonde Barbie. This is the year of the Blondes!
Wow, that post of yours didn’t turn out so well.
First 13 and 14-year-old boys are still boys, even as the better players in their sports, I was an athlete and I never knew of any of us who didn’t think of our 13 and 14 year old efforts as childish or who had reached anything close to our full growth and development.
You went back to that one event that you say “hecklers’ bring up but I said this is international, for example, America, Sweden, and Australia.
I agree, but when you get down into the weeds, that gets tricky.
It is necessary to separate club salaries and income from service on the men's and women's national teams. Those are two different kitties.
The big asymmetry is that MLS soccer draws much larger crowds and, since it has more teams in more tv markets, it has a much richer tv contract. Club salaries are much higher than in the NWSL, which is growing but which is still far behind. So far, so good. At the club level, all the pay equity issues will disappear if the women draw bigger crowds. I try to be polite about it, but this is my go pound sand argument when the pay equity comes up at this level.
(And it does come up. About 15 years ago, several of the dads on my daughter's club team started taking the girls to women's professional games. Men's and women's soccer are different enough tactically that we thought our little munchkins should actually see the kind of soccer that they might grow up to play someday, in higher division club soccer, in college, and theoretically professionally in the unlikely event that any of our daughters turned out to be that dedicated to the game, and that good. They watched plenty of men's soccer as well, but it ain't the same. The girls were U-10 when we started, and they got to see real big girls' soccer. 15 years later, this is still a father-daughter thing for us. We are season ticket holders, and we are now fans, having bought into the team bad years as well as good. So whenever I encounter an ignorant doofus of the feminazi variety, my first question is, "Where are your seats?" If they're smart, they descalate quickly.)
Anyhow, since the men make so much more from the club salaries, the money they get from U.S. Soccer for national team games is chump change. I'm sure they're glad to have it, but for the men, playing on the national team is a matter of pride and prestige, not money. For the women, club salaries are still very low, and the national team salaries are much more important. And in the women's game, nobody is making really big bucks (aside from endorsements for a very few).
This led to very different contracts for the men's and women's national team players. Going back many years, that was the root of many disputes. The contracts have changed over the years, and the women gradually won enough concessions that the women's U.S. Soccer salary and benefit package was arguably better than the men's. Arguably ... but a union is involved, so all differences get highlighted for bargaining purposes and groupthink sets in. In addition, U.S. Soccer has a long history of absolutely tone deaf, boneheaded public statements that justifiably infuriated the women, who naturally tossed them into the court of public opinion where the press was totally one-sided. A lot of the antagonism could have been avoided given a modicum of intelligence on the part of U.S. Soccer leadership.
That's a long story and I don't want to rehash the history here. I'll just say that the leadership of U.S. Soccer has been as bad as the congressional Republicans, most of whom wouldn't know a winning issue if it bit them in the butt -- let alone how to frame a winning issue persuasively. When someone with a winning argument has a communications strategy of continuous brain farts, at some point they deserve what they get.
I didn't pay a lot of attention to the last round of contract talks. I gather that U.S. Soccer was finally trying to get the men and women on the same contract -- this is for the national teams, not league play -- which is long overdue. Going forward, the women need to grow their league in the right way. An early exit from the World Cup will hurt because the NWSL has always used national team players as a major draw. The league needs to evolve beyond that and build a real fan base for each club. For that to happen, more moms have to take their daughters to games. More young women need to suggest an NWSL game for date night -- yes, really, and I guarantee you that their boyfriends can learn to enjoy watching 20-something young women playing pretty good soccer if it pleases their girlfriends. More young women who grew up playing soccer need to start buying tickets themselves. Do that and the pay issues will disappear.
Grumpy old men on FR can grump all we want. The solution to the problem is in the hands of young women. If they won't support women's soccer, it's on them. That's why the ignorant doofuses of the feminazi variety need to deescalate quickly. I'll make it personal pretty fast. Walk the walk or shut up.
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