USWNT in the ToN 2018

I wish Ellis would give Franch a run in goal, but I know it's not going to happen.

 

i'm certainly not the only one who has been predicting this.

it was always going to happen once real soccer cultures started paying attention to the women's game.

we'll have to work ten times harder to regain the kind of soccer hegemony we once had when we were the only ones really playing and paying the women.

the fun will be in trying - altho I don't think we'll ever be that dominant again.

 

She deserves at least a try. The problem is that keepers take awhile to settle into the game and the pressure of the international setting. Ellis tends to throw out players after a bad performance IF they aren't on her favorites list like Morgan Brian, Alex Morgan, Pugh, Abby Dahlkemper and Lindsey Horan who can do no wrong and always start no matter how poorly they play. Jane never got to redeem herself, she was quickly tossed aside and now doesn't even get call ups. Solo had some horrific games early in her career too, but no one remembers. SHe needed to start consistently to get better.

 

Campbell's issues have not been limited to WNT play.

 

So what did we learn?
1. Championship was meaningless for me. I would have bet the farm going in that the winner was decided US vs Aus and don't care about tie breakers.
2. Have to be impressed with US resolve against the Aussies. How many times have u seen the WNT come up with the late goal(s) when a lot of teams with a different culture would have been done?
3. Still good against teams that give them space and tight in the collar against team that don't.
4. The numbers...Morgan 4G,1A; Rapinoe 1G, 3A; Horan & Heath 1G, 1A; Ertz & Lavelle first goals since coming off injuries.
5. Still suspect against counters. All three opponents scored that way.
6. Still Naeher all the time. If this trend continues (Hey I could be GK against some CONCACAF teams!!!) and something unfortunate happens to Naeher in the buildup, the US could be heading to WC with 3 GKs with less than 10 combined caps.
7. Dunn seems to be the WC LB which is irony squared.
8. Ellis absolutely positively needed to bring in 25 players despite interfering with both NWSL & ICC play, but only actually used 18.

 

All 25 are probably happy with that, because it means they're the ones still with a shot at France. It was a FIFA window, so NWSL was shut down anyways. ICC carries zero weight at this level.

The 23 they kept allowed them to do 11-v-11 drills

 

Feature not a bug. Ellis clearly belongs in the "outscore 'em" rather than "shut 'em down" camp.

Which makes it the more impressive that her World Championship came taking over a team whose strength was in "shutting 'em down" and in fact shutting them down...

 

Well except for US players who missed NWSL matches on 7/20,21,22 because they were called in before the window but hey, players from Brazil, Japan & Australia stayed with their clubs and covered for them. And in the grand scheme of things ICC and ToN carry the same amount of weight which isn't much. Of course USSoccer made money so their happy and Ellis seems to think a 90th minute draw with the number 8 team in the rankings was a major victory.

 

The current group of ladies just do not seem to have the killer instinct that was one of the hallmarks of the entire team that played with Michelle Akers. That entire team was like one girl I coached some years ago: She was having a very bad game and after one VERY bad miss on a shot at goal she was trotting up the field and cursing under her breath, but not quite enough. As she passed the ref he heard her and snapped out a yellow card and said, "I won't have a lady on my field cursing like that." She spun around on him and stepped up, she only came up to about the bottom of his rib cage, pointed at the bench and firmly said, "Over there I'm a lady, out here I'm a soccer player!" Fortunately the ref had a bit of a sense of humor and did not produce the red card.

That take no prisoners attitude and not accept failure in their self or in the rest of the team is mostly missing from the current WNT. That is not necessarily a bad thing but the worst insult I could give the team I mentioned above was to tell them they were playing like girls. This team plays quite a bit too "girly" for my taste.

I heard that the New Zealand U20 WNT, in qualifying or maybe in a practice match, beat a team 40-0. I think the US WNT, at all ages, has become too nice for that. And at the top levels "nice" gets you nothing but sent home early from any important tournament.

Individual talent, which exists in abundance with these women, has carried this current group quite a ways but their "niceness" will get them beaten by teams with lesser talent if it continues.

 

I'll give a different perspective. These women are every bit as tough and bad ass as the earlier ones were. The team's record, against better opponents, demonstrates that.

A problem for the younger players, however, with social media, is that all sorts of people pick apart every mistake they make and blast it out over social media. That's a very tough environment in which to play.

 

You have a point but I still think the ladies as a group are not mean enough.

However I will concede that (anti)social media has had an adverse impact on players, teams, national associations and even fans. I particularly believe that services like twitter are a HUGE negative in today's world for sports and everyone else. Just look at the damage our (USA's) illustrious leader can do now in just a few "tweets" while it took others many months to accomplish that level of damage.

Having said that one thing that sports professionals "should" be able to do is ignore what every one says except for their coach, teammates, team staff and sometimes parents and siblings. Also if those whose opinions should matter get influenced by the (anti)social media then they should be able to ignore that influence as well.

Mistakes have always been part of sport and if what others, outside your team situation, say about your performance bothers you then you need to get tougher.

In the long run the only critic that matters is yourself and that is who players should listen to first and foremost and that is the person that need, spots wise, the killer instinct and that is one major thing that that I see lacking in all US football teams. They are now just unwilling to put teams away when they can and attack with abandon.

 

The team doesn't have that bite anymore because we have a lot of individual personalities and that comes with egotistical attitudes and thus creates lack of chemistry. We have a bunch of forwards playing other positions and hardly any natural defenders unlike our older squads. It's pretty obvious that sometimes our princess players don't make the best decisions in the final third. We go for the low percentage hit and we do have the talent to make that happen but why not pass the ball to the open player and have an assist for once? Rapinoe and Heath are the few that plays the ball to whoever is in the box, having success getting those assists. IF we lose them again or they become injured for another tournament, we're done because I'm not impressed by our younger set. Also nothing against Naher but my gosh does she give my heart a workout with every mistake she makes. Surely we have better goalkeepers than Naher and Harris, aren't we known for making really good keepers? We need another Solo or another Scurry otherwise we're never having a clean sheet ever again.

 

...to you. and to those of us to whom the nwsl is a fully formed fantasy.

but not to others, including ussoccer. and ussoccer pays the bills. they formed, and continue to prop up the nwsl precisely for the purposes on wnt development, even tho the league doesn't have enough of us fans to be viable.

ton vs icc? no contest!

now the australians & brazilians could rightly say that they're being treated unfairly, and leave. but that's not likely to happen. and ussoccer, in spite of any platitudes they might pronounce, didn't form the nwsl to develop these other teams.

boom!

and they got in 3 more games against top ten teams.

owners and club coaches may be fuming. but they have to have a more viable product before they can start telling ussoccer where to go.

 

USSoccer wants to be perceived as the nurturing parent to the NWSL but actually come off as more of a court appointed guardian who suffers their existence because it's part of the job. Ellis comes off as the wicked stepmother. Somehow this has turned into an adversarial relationship instead of a partnership. If USSoccer cared about their woman's team they'd slap Ellis down hard when she does stuff like this to show the league that Ellis isn't running USSoccer and the NWSL.

 

Agre

Good grief! If Ellis has a single miss-step, you'll be demanding her beheading. But if she does what she believes is needed to avoid a miss-step, you demand her beheading. Pick one or the other.

PS - If you'd had your way over the last two years, would the team's record be better than it's been over the last 12 months?

 

I think you are taking a highly subjective impression and treating it as though it were revealed wisdom or perfectly obvious to all observers or something .

Furthermore, it is a terrible cliché-- just off the top of my head, famous athletes who have been accused of this lack include Joe Louis, Gene Tunney, Joe DiMaggio, Franco Harris, Deion Sanders, Bjorn Borg, Jack Nicklaus, and so on and so forth. Tunney had no killer instinct-- but he beat the poster boy for it, Jack Dempsey. Ali was accused of this deficiency, yet he beat another famous killer type, Sonny Liston twice.

Proof is in the pudding, I think. The USWNT got itself into position where it absolutely had to have a goal--and it got one. It needed to beat Brazil by at least two-- and it did. Those birds in hand impress my a lot more than hypothetical failures due to hypothetical lacks which sometime in the future may cause failure against some opponent they have not yet failed against.

You get two goals up on somebody you make them chase, tiring themselves out and exposing themselves more-- that's just soccer 101.

 

Or, as an alternative, you continue playing in the way that dot you the goals and score two more or three or four or as many as you can.

Yes, what you said is traditional wisdom in much of football but it often results in letting teams back into matches that could have been and should have been put away. Many people say that a two goal lead is the most dangerous, I don't really agree with that as two is ALWAYS better than one, but if you change your style of play that got you a two goal lead then it is not rare at all that you give one up thus letting a team back into a game when it was about to be put away.

What you suggest might be correct very late in a game or if your possession play is really really good but it is, as often as not, just a way to let a team back into a game and the attacking mentality is very hard, sometimes impossible, to restore once it has been squandered.

Unless the style that got you the lead is extremely high risk you should continue that style and effort unless you are up by six or seven or more. Doing otherwise is quite often a mistake and sometimes a decisive one.

There are a few sayings that seem to apply here:
1. The phrase that leads to failure the most often is, "That's the way it has always been done."
2. "Failure to innovate usually equals failure."
3. "If you are not the lead dog your view never changes."

We, the US are not in a secure position as the "lead dogs" and if we continue to let teams that are poorer than us stay in games then, at some point, they will pass us for the foremost position.

 

No. No one was a bigger badass than Akers. When Akers stepped on the field even Chuck Norris would say, "Now that's a real bad badass".

 

And in a diminutive package Hamm was equally as intimidating. She was always one of the best at firmly planting her cleats on the throat of an opponent and grinding until they just gave up.

Then there was Lilly, Fawcett, Foudy and Overbeck four other ladies that did not give a damn about the "feelings" of opponents. They just scored whenever possible and then scored more when it was impossible.

That team was not perfect BUT it was about as "mean" as any team I have ever seen men or women.

 

No the record wouldn't. People r way too caught up in the record. Sermanni was fired based on a better record than Ellis has. Despite my many problems with Ellis this comes down to one thing...has she in the two years following the Olympic ouster fixed the problem of being unable to break down a good defense? If not, and we just saw it happen again against Australia, why would I think they r suddenly going to be able to do it in WC? Compared with the team that won the cup Id say the offense is better, the defense is worse, the GK is less reliable and they won't have the advantage of a home crowd.

 

I would also include the underrated Venturini in that group. As good as those players were, they had their moments where they came up short, where that meanness you describe seemed to be a bit lacking. I think sometimes there's a tendency to filter that past through nostalgic lenses.

I remember watching the 1995 World Cup semifinal. Akers wasn't at a 100% and that made a difference. But everyone else you mentioned was there. A giraffe name Aaroness converted a header in a chaotic box during the first 10 minutes, after which Norway parked the bus for the rest of the match. The US shelled the goal with shots, many from distance, hitting the post at a few times, they were in Norway's half virtually the entire match after the early goal, but couldn't capitalize. Even as early as the 60the minute the body language became more negative, frustrated, and you could see the self belief in some players seem to be lacking. They lost. That meanness you describe seemed to be absent in just about all of them except Michelle. Now you could say they applied the lessons 4 years later, but even in beating China on penalties, they had their shaky moments during that match, and that tournament...it wasn't just meanness or perseverance that won them that title, it was talent and a bit of luck too. Michelle and Lilly aside, I would say on the whole the mid to late 90s team was more poise and class, than mean or blue collar. From my subjective vantage point, the mentally toughest or "meanest" USWNT for me was probably the 2011-2012 years.

 

Was their record better than the current team's?

 

Well said.