U.S. Women’s World Cup Roster Reflects a Team in Transition
Here’s a sentence you see each 4 years: The United States is a favourite to win the Women’s World Cup.
Why ought to the general public not consider the hype this time?
The United States’ résumé is prime of its class: It is the No. 1-ranked ladies’s soccer staff on the earth and the two-time defending world champion. And in contrast to some other ladies’s staff, it has 4 tiny golden stars sewn above its jersey crest to point out this system’s pedigree of 4 World Cup titles.
The Americans are set to reach at this summer time’s match in Australia and New Zealand with a roster anchored by 9 gamers who’ve lifted the trophy earlier than. For three of these gamers — forwards Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe and defender Kelley O’Hara — this will likely be their fourth World Cup. For two different gamers — goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher and midfielder Julie Ertz — this will likely be their third.
But realizing what it takes to win and doing it with one of many youngest and most inexperienced groups the United States has ever taken to a World Cup are very various things. Of the 23 gamers named to the staff on Wednesday, 14 will likely be World Cup rookies. And the staff should discover a strategy to play at its greatest, even with out its revered captain and its most harmful striker, who’re out with accidents.
“We have a roster with depth and versatility, and that will help us take on all the challenges that will be coming our way,” the U.S. coach, Vlatko Andonovski, stated in a press release on Wednesday.
Andonovski, who coached the staff to a bronze medal on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, has spent the previous few years making an attempt to rebuild his squad as this match loomed, easing out veterans and introducing new expertise in an effort to construct a staff that he thinks can win this summer time and succeed into the longer term.
Andonovski was confronted with a couple of surprises as he tweaked the roster, which made a tough course of even tougher. Just final week, he misplaced his captain, defender Becky Sauerbrunn, who was dominated out with a lingering foot damage. Other accidents way back price him the providers of Sam Mewis, a midfield fixture of the 2019 World Cup champions, and extra lately the presence of two precious attacking choices, Mallory Swanson, who gave the impression to be peaking on the good time, and Catarina Macario.
Still, he had a core of stalwarts he might rely on, together with stars like Morgan and Rapinoe, who deliver years of worldwide expertise in addition to their gravitas as two of essentially the most well-known and most outspoken feminine athletes on the earth. He can even have midfielder Rose Lavelle, the breakout star of the 2019 match after she made scoring look all too straightforward. Lavelle and Lindsey Horan will supply a well-recognized mixture of grit and flash in midfield.
There will likely be many new stars, together with Sophia Smith, 22, who was final yr’s most beneficial participant of the National Women’s Soccer League, and 21-year-old Trinity Rodman, the 2021 N.W.S.L. rookie of the yr and daughter of Dennis Rodman, the previous N.B.A. All-Star.
The Americans’ first recreation will likely be July 22 in opposition to Vietnam in Auckland, New Zealand — 9 p.m. Eastern time on July 21. That will likely be adopted by the staff’s greatest recreation for the reason that final World Cup: a rematch with the opposite 2019 finalist, the Netherlands, that can in all probability depart the winner with a a lot simpler path within the knockout stage.
Andonovski might need even stunned himself with a few of the names he had penciled in. But as with a number of different prime groups, accidents compelled him to change his plans in current months.
Sauerbrunn, 38, introduced final week that she would miss the World Cup with a foot damage. She was not solely a dogged central defender for years, but in addition a revered function mannequin for her teammates: the staff’s Zen grasp of confidence and calm, to not point out the anchor of its again line because it received the previous two World Cups.
Her announcement got here solely weeks after Swanson, who had been Andonovski’s most harmful ahead this yr, tore the patellar tendon in her left knee. Other gamers with World Cup expertise, together with Mewis, Abby Dahlkemper, Christen Press and Tobin Heath, have been out with accidents or are nonetheless getting back from surgical procedures. Macario merely ran out of time to get again up to the mark after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee final yr whereas enjoying in France.
There will likely be, nevertheless, many acquainted and skilled gamers when Andonovski and his staff collect for a coaching camp subsequent week in California. Ertz, 10 months after having a child, has stepped immediately again into the staff’s midfield. Crystal Dunn, who gave beginning to a son 13 months in the past, will proceed to be a rock on protection, as will Emily Sonnett. Dunn and Sonnett have performed within the World Cup as soon as earlier than.
Casual followers must be taught some new names on the identical time, although. In her World Cup debut, Naomi Girma, a 23-year-old defender for the San Diego Wave, former Stanford staff captain and daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, will likely be in line to interchange Sauerbrunn. Savannah DeMelo has by no means performed a global recreation for the nationwide staff however is having a robust yr for her N.W.S.L. staff. And three younger forwards — Smith, Rodman and Alyssa Thompson — have what it takes to push Morgan, Rapinoe and Lynn Williams up entrance.
Thompson, 18, was known as up after Swanson’s damage; she is going to turn out to be the youngest U.S. ladies’s soccer participant at a World Cup since not less than 2007. The first draft choose on this yr’s N.W.S.L. draft, she has the vitality, talent and phenomenal pace to be a generational participant. But she can also be simply out of highschool.
With all the brand new gamers mingled with the outdated, it stays to be seen if the staff that exhibits up in New Zealand can have the swagger of earlier ones. The staff’s pre-eminence within the ladies’s recreation has been below risk from the rising investments, and the rising energy, of rivals in Europe. Last fall, the United States misplaced three video games in a row for the primary time since 1993.
That the defeats got here in opposition to three European opponents — Germany, England and Spain — was an unmistakable message to outsiders: The United States nonetheless ranks among the many favorites. But its margin could also be finer than ever.
