The Olympics start in a little over a week for women’s soccer, as the tournament gets a couple of days’ head start on the rest of the competitors assembling in France.
As preparation, the United States’ final prep games before an Olympics used to be the likes of China, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Sweden, and Canada. This year’s sendoff opponents were No. 29 Mexico and No. 44 Costa Rica.
The result: one goal in two games with pretty much a first-choice lineup.
If you’re a U.S. women’s national team supporter, this should scare you to death. And it’s not just the result, but the way that the team arrived at these results.
As much hype as the U.S. forward line has received since Emma Hayes chose the 22-player full roster, the team has made opposing goalkeepers look like world-beaters. So many times, the attack either missed the goal or hit the goalkeeper.
Too, the U.S. players seem to not have the mentality of taking the ball right to the opposition, waiting for them to set up on defense — to “park the bus,” in the parlance of the game.
It’s a shame that the product on the field thus far in the Emma Hayes era has produced some pretty dismal results. Sure, the team has spun four clean sheets, but against opposition which is ranked 20th or lower in the FIFA world rankings.
It’s a shame that this power outage has come after women’s soccer in America seemingly was coming out of a dark period. Numerous star players had fled the U.S. domestic league, the NWSL, because of abusive team cultures on more than half its teams.
I think you are still seeing one major flaw in team chemistry: one of the players not playing in the NWSL just happens to be the team captain, Lindsey Horan, who plays with Olympique Lyon.
Unlike many other U.S. teams in the past, this team sometimes looks lost and discombobulated, not attacking space, not being aggressive in terms of 1-v-1 play, and sometimes not being able to figure out what to do with that leather-covered bladder out on the field.
It would be easy to savage the team with the same rhetoric as some have done with the men’s national side. And I think there could be some question as to whether the current pay-to-play system of girls’ and women’s development is yielding, in the words of Alexi Lalas, “soft, tattooed millionares.”
Because there is more money to be made in women’s soccer than ever before. You are hearing stories of transfer fees for female players, such as the $860,000 fee that Bay FC paid for the rights to Racheal Kundananji. There are marketing opportunities galore for the elite women’s player.
But a lot of the opportunities only come from winning major tournaments, especially an Olympics. I’m not so sure that our women can pull it all together in such a short period of time. Chemistry, such as what was found with the U.S. teams in the 1990s, took years.
