Code Orange..Code Orange!!! Lionesses Pride Hunt the Bald Eagle; WC Final USA - NL

Discussion in 'The Netherlands' started by feyenoordsoccerfan, Jul 3, 2019.

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  1. MrOranjeBal

    MrOranjeBal Member

    Apr 7, 2009
    Club:
    AZ
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
  2. https://www.trouw.nl/sport/nederlan...ale~b8d8cd31/?referer=https://www.google.com/
    De bondscoach erkent dat het nog altijd een onbeschrijfelijk gevoel is dat Nederland op pas het tweede WK in de eindstrijd staat. Ze weet dat de Amerikanen favoriet zijn, maar ook dat in een finale alles mogelijk is. “We zullen niet domineren. Mocht het voetballend niet lukken, dan gaan we de beuk erin gooien. En als we eerst moeten tegenhouden, dan gaan we eerst tegenhouden. Maar als we lang de nul houden, kunnen we ook zomaar een doelpunt maken.”

    The national coach acknowledges that it is still an indescribable feeling that the Netherlands in only the second World Cup is in the final battle. She knows that the Americans are favorite, but also that everything is possible in a final. "We will not dominate. If it footballing wise does not work, then we will get physical. And if we first have to push back, then we will push back first. But if we keep a clean sheet for a long time, we just like that can also score a goal. ”
     
  3. [​IMG]
    Dominique Bloodworth. Beeld BSR Agency
    Dominique Bloodworth, centrale verdedigster

    “We houden vast aan onze routines, dat geeft vertrouwen en rust. Voor mij is het een extra bijzondere wedstrijd omdat ik ben getrouwd met een Amerikaan. Natuurlijk is Amerika een topland, maar alle landen hebben hun zwakke kanten en daar gaan we een strijdplan tegenover stellen.

    “Elke wedstrijd begint met 0-0, al duurt dat tegen Amerika dit WK niet zo lang. We moeten er voor zorgen dat in de eerste twaalf minuten de bal er niet ingaat. Daar moeten we ons heel bewust van zijn. Als verdedigster hoop ik natuurlijk op een clean sheet. Alex Morgan is een topspits. Ik heb wat beelden van haar bekeken en ik heb gezien dat ik er kort moet opzitten en goed moet kijken naar waar ze heen loopt. Maar ik heb ook gekeken naar andere speelsters, waarmee ik in aanraking kan komen.

    Dominique Bloodworth, central defender

    “We stick to our routines, it gives confidence and peace. For me it is an extra special match because I am married to an American. Of course America is a top country, but all countries have their weaknesses and we are going to come up with a battle plan matching that.

    “Every match starts with 0-0, although it doesnot last that long against America this World Cup. We must make sure that the ball does not go in during the first twelve minutes. We must be very aware of that. As a defender, I naturally hope for a clean sheet. Alex Morgan is a top striker. I have seen some footage of her and I have seen that I have to mark tightly and keep an eye at where she is going. But I also looked at other players I can encounter.
     
  4. Orange14

    Orange14 Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 27, 2007
    Bethesda, MD
    Club:
    AFC Ajax
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
    ^^Way cool message!!!
     
  5. MrOranjeBal

    MrOranjeBal Member

    Apr 7, 2009
    Club:
    AZ
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
  6. Brilliant Dutch

    Brilliant Dutch Member+

    Ajax
    Netherlands
    Oct 14, 2013
    Amsterdam, Holland
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
    That tiny cup is a disgrace. It looks more like a dildo than a cup....LOL

    [​IMG]
     
  7. Well, we didnot take our chances when they were presented when it was 0-0, so that's it.
    Anyway, the Orange Lionesses can be proud of themselves.:thumbsup:
     
    Orange14 repped this.
  8. Orange14

    Orange14 Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 27, 2007
    Bethesda, MD
    Club:
    AFC Ajax
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
    Agree and I was pleasantly surprised that they recovered pretty well from the overtime semifinal match. Several US players looked just as tired in the last 10 minutes of play. I feel bad for van der Gragt on conceding the penalty as she did a lot of good things on the evening. It was clear that Wiegman wanted them to play defensively as any questionable ball was kicked out of play. Men's teams are much better controlling balls in those situations and starting play up field. I think this is one of the biggest differences between the two.
     
  9. upload_2019-7-7_19-57-29.png
    upload_2019-7-7_19-58-13.png
    Possesion.
    Shots: on target;off target;blocked.
    Saves.
    upload_2019-7-7_20-1-59.png
    Match stats: Corners; Yellow cards; Red cards; Fouls committed; Off side.
     
  10. PuckVanHeel

    PuckVanHeel Member+

    Oct 4, 2011
    Club:
    Feyenoord
    The USA has more registered players than Netherlands has population
     
  11. Orange14

    Orange14 Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 27, 2007
    Bethesda, MD
    Club:
    AFC Ajax
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
    I think this counts all the youth teams of which there are many. All the high schools in our area have teams and almost every college does as well.
     
  12. PuckVanHeel

    PuckVanHeel Member+

    Oct 4, 2011
    Club:
    Feyenoord
    Yes, this is including youth team obviously. 50% of all female players in the world are USA (at worst 40%).

    In some countries the distribution is very skewed, like France with only 8% being female and big size China even as low as 1%! Thus that leads to a situation where the USA player pool is as big as the rest of the world together.
     
  13. Well, we will see the USA in the Final of the Olympics again I think.
    We're no match for the rest of Europe.
     
  14. #66 feyenoordsoccerfan, Jul 7, 2019
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2019
    Those numbers are interesting, but in my eyes irrelevant. You only can select 23? players for a tournement and put on the pitch 11, aside from subs.
    So with increasing importance of the CL for women football, raising the pressure levels to play under and the need to improve as a player to stay competitive in that tournement, the rising level of club competitions in England, Germany, France all add to up the level of the quality players. So although individual countries may have lagging numbers in total players, the quality of those players that matter are going up too.
    It's as simple as that. Make sure your system is excellent in sifting out true talents, make sure they're in a development trajectum to extract that talent and turn it into class, give that talent a stage to get battle hardened using that talent and you're ready to take on the world.
    That's the reason why we Dutch are for decades a constant force in the soccer world despite our limited population.
    That same MO got us joining the top of the women pyramid and is going to keep us there. Simply because we're an organised bunch with a nation wide supported philosophy on football as to how it should be played. This sets us apart as a soccer nation and is the source of our presence on the top floor of male soccer and the source of our rise to it in women soccer.
    It's this cultural football heritage that other nations lack and thus not the constant factor in soccer like the Orange teams.

    Edit: It's also the reason I fight against pundits that start moaning about our outdated ways and are clamouring for changes, radical changes/abandoning our ways, just because of a temporay drought. We've seen that kind of shit after the failed qualies 2016-2018.
    Nothing changed and see where we are again.
    I'm always right.
    Why?
    Because the others are wrong and those weathercocks turn to every sigh of wind while I use a solid map and compass.
     
  15. PuckVanHeel

    PuckVanHeel Member+

    Oct 4, 2011
    Club:
    Feyenoord
    I don't think you are right with that nothing changed after 2014...
     
  16. The pundits were shitting over us sticking to 4-3-3. We sticked to that as the base of our tactical foundation. It doesnot mean variations never were used. What was needed was adding power and physical toughness, but that's hardly a change.
     
  17. Orange14

    Orange14 Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 27, 2007
    Bethesda, MD
    Club:
    AFC Ajax
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
    What was most disturbing to me were comments over on one of the Ajax supporter websites. They published a short story on the match and in the comments the hatred for women's soccer was really bad. Maybe one out of 10 posts were supportive or neutral. I really wonder when I read such bad stuff whether these anonymous posters have a real life.
     
  18. PuckVanHeel

    PuckVanHeel Member+

    Oct 4, 2011
    Club:
    Feyenoord
    New York Times report

    Stars and Stripes (and Wins) Forever
    The United States women’s team has always played against its history as much as flesh-and-blood opponents. On Sunday, the current edition raised the bar ever higher.

    LYON, France — Rose Lavelle was 9½ — the half is important, when you’re 9 — when the women that changed everything arrived in Cincinnati.

    It was October 2004, a few months after the United States women’s soccer team had won the gold medal in the Athens Olympics, five years after it had conquered the world. Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain and the rest were traveling the country, playing exhibition games, as a sort of victory tour.

    Lavelle was there to watch at the Paul Brown Stadium for a game against New Zealand. It was more of a carnival than a contest: the Americans won, 6-0, the sort of procession that — in the eyes of a child — befitted their greatness. Lavelle fell for them, and fell hard.

    She became “obsessed,” she said a few weeks ago, with the team that would go down in history as the 99ers, the team that won the World Cup on home soil in the year that became their calling card, the team that transformed the arc of women’s soccer in the United States and, more slowly, around the globe.


    On Sunday, in the baking heat of Lyon, Lavelle scored the second, clinching goal as the latest incarnation of the United States women’s national team beat the Netherlands, 2-0, not just to lift the World Cup, but to do what the 99ers did not quite manage, and retain it. “It’s crazy how things come full circle,” Lavelle said.

    Pretty much everyone on this team has a story about the 99ers, even those who were too young to remember them firsthand, whose knowledge has been drawn — like Lindsey Horan’s — from videotapes. They have all taken inspiration from what those players did. They have all inhaled their greatness, and come to revere their status. Horan, for example, had been told that several of the 99ers had come to Lyon to watch this final. Even with a World Cup winner’s medal around her neck, she seemed a little star-struck, somehow stunned by the idea that they should be watching her. “They are the legends that we all look up to,” she said.

    In March, when the United States played England in the SheBelieves Cup, the players were asked to nominate a woman who had inspired them. Their jerseys, for that night, would be emblazoned with their heroines’ names, rather than their own. Sam Mewis, who was six in 1999, went for Hamm; the goalkeeper Adrianna Franch went for one of her predecessors, Brianna Scurry.


    A month later, the 1999 team was presented to the crowd at halftime of a friendly against Belgium in Los Angeles. The jerseys that the players wore to win the World Cup were designed by Nike specifically to pay homage to the jerseys Hamm and the others wore two decades ago. “They are still a big presence in our lives,” Horan said.

    Even at a distance of a generation, it is a presence all the current players feel, an almost tangible link with what might otherwise feel like an age of myth.

    “They laid a foundation for us,” Lavelle said. “They laid this mentality out of never give up, never say die.” Horan said that she feels that the “fight and the mentality started with them.”

    The 99ers are widely credited with creating the atmosphere that young players find when they first enter this team: not intimidating or inhibiting, according to Tierna Davidson — at 20, the youngest member of the current squad — but “close-knit, resilient, incredibly uplifting.”

    “There’s a natural selection,” she said. “I think if you don’t have that attitude, you get weeded out. The identity of this team is badass women, who fight to the death, who have each others’ backs no matter what. The type of person this team attracts is resilient, gritty.”

    That can be traced to the United States national team as the 99ers envisioned it, as they defined it. Those characteristics that were inculcated in this program two decades ago are the same that swept this edition of the team, these latest successors of that side, to glory here in France: a willingness to run harder, faster, farther than anyone else; a refusal to countenance the idea of defeat; a ruthless, defiant streak.

    Those traits are now hard-wired into the team, however much the players change, however fast the clock ticks, what Davidson described as an “unnamed American culture of desire and want and grit.” That is the tradition that any player who steps into this team has to maintain; those are the standards that, Alex Morgan said, this current team is “doing a pretty damn good job” of keeping.

    In that sense, this final was a fitting one. Unlike in 2015, it was not over after a quarter of an hour; it remained in the balance for an hour, more, until a Megan Rapinoe penalty and Lavelle’s wonderful strike and the cumulative weariness of a long month under the hot sun ended the Dutch resistance. The United States had to work for this triumph.

    It hurt, sometimes literally: Kelley O’Hara left the field at halftime after clashing heads with Lieke Martens; Becky Sauerbrunn had to continue with a cut above her right eye; Morgan had a badly bruised arm, ample sacrifice to win the penalty that Rapinoe converted.

    And in doing so, this team surpassed the achievements of the team that has for so long served as its inspiration, its gold standard, its idols.

    There has been a sense, right from the start, that the United States was not in France to compete against flesh-and-blood rivals; it always seemed to have too much for any foe that crossed its path.

    The host nation was supposed to end its dominance; the United States scored early in each half, and eased through. England was meant to be a challenge; the United States scored early, and then reacted furiously when its opponent was presumptuous enough to equalize.

    The Netherlands lasted longer than anyone, though watching Stefanie van der Gragt, its central defender, draw every last jolt of energy from her exhausted body in the last few minutes simply to stop Morgan or Tobin Heath or Carli Lloyd turning a defeat into a rout told a story. The Dutch had been taken to the edge of their capacity, and then pulled headlong beyond it. Like everyone else, they could not live with the Americans, not over 90 minutes.

    No, the United States’ main opponent has not been physical, but temporal. This team has been here to compete with history, to see if it could take the one step that eluded even the 99ers, and retain the World Cup.

    Not only has it succeeded, with an air of tranquil inevitability, but it has done so after a tournament in which the standard has been higher — and the competition fiercer — than in any previous edition. It has witnessed a surge in quality around the globe, and it has met the challenge. It is, without question, the best team in the world. It may be, now, the best of all time.

    The players themselves, of course, would not go that far. “I hate comparing us to past teams,” Morgan said. “We all have our own legacy.” But they remember well enough the impact the 99ers had on them, the power that success can bring, the inspiration it can provide.

    Just as the young Lavelle watched, rapt, as Hamm and Chastain and the rest swept past New Zealand, transfixed by their greatness, so too will aspirant internationals watch Lavelle with shining eyes; just as the young Horan pored over videos that triumph, so too will the clips and gifs of what she and her teammates have achieved hypnotize a new generation. “Hopefully we will become legends to future internationals,” she said.

    Things do come full circle, and the circle keeps on turning, a tradition passed down through the years, through the decades, a torch that keeps on burning.

    High in the stands of the Stade de Lyon, two girls stood watching the United States celebrate, glitter spread across the field, firework smoke in the air. They looked about eight or nine. Heath and Horan, their jerseys read. They looked down at the celebrations. They stood perfectly still. They could not tear their eyes away.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/sports/soccer/uswnt-world-cup-final.html
     
  19. This:
    The Netherlands lasted longer than anyone, though watching Stefanie van der Gragt, its central defender, draw every last jolt of energy from her exhausted body in the last few minutes simply to stop Morgan or Tobin Heath or Carli Lloyd turning a defeat into a rout told a story. The Dutch had been taken to the edge of their capacity, and then pulled headlong beyond it.

    Proud of the fighters mentality of our women. True Lionesses pride.
     
  20. bunbohue

    bunbohue Member

    Apr 5, 2005
    It will depend on the draw; however, Japan will play at home and they almost defeated Netherlands. I still think England and France are on the same level if not slightly ahead of Netherlands. They defended and contained USA well (plus Veenedaal's excellent form) until that clumsy challenge leading to PK. Unless Netherlands could come back and score soon (like England almost did or Japan 8 years ago), they did not create/many good chances. They did well to get to the finals so they deserve some recognition for going as far as they could. I think they are 1 of the top 4 teams heading to Olympics.
     
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  21. Orange14

    Orange14 Moderator
    Staff Member

    Apr 27, 2007
    Bethesda, MD
    Club:
    AFC Ajax
    Nat'l Team:
    Netherlands
    van der Gragt fell on the pitch at the end of the half and was helped to her feet. The camera cut away too fast for me to see what the problem was but I do agree that she probably suffered a knock of some kind. Both teams ran out of gas with 20 minutes to go. You saw how the US could not finish anyone of the breakaways they had. Tobin Heath could hardly walk of the field when she was subbed. The big problem is the two US MFs Mewis and Ernst shut down both Spitse and Groenen. I suspect Groenen was not full recovered from the semifinal match. Spitse turns 30 soon and while I thought Groenen had a good tournament she has to amp up her game. Until the Dutch can better build up through the MF they will continue to have trouble with teams such as the US who can push them into long passes which are not as effective.
     

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