Right here’s a sentence you see each 4 years: The US is a favourite to win the Ladies’s World Cup.
Why ought to the general public not imagine the hype this time?
The US’ résumé is prime of its class: It’s the No. 1-ranked girls’s soccer workforce on the earth and the two-time defending world champion. And in contrast to another girls’s workforce, it has 4 tiny golden stars sewn above its jersey crest to indicate this system’s pedigree of 4 World Cup titles.
The Individuals are set to reach at this summer season’s match in Australia and New Zealand with a roster anchored by 9 gamers who’ve lifted the trophy earlier than. For 3 of these gamers — forwards Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe and defender Kelley O’Hara — this might be their fourth World Cup. For 2 different gamers — goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher and midfielder Julie Ertz — this might be their third.
However figuring out what it takes to win and doing it with one of many youngest and most inexperienced groups america has ever taken to a World Cup are very various things. Of the 23 gamers named to the workforce on Wednesday, 14 might be World Cup rookies. And the workforce should discover a solution to play at its greatest, even with out its revered captain and its most harmful striker, who’re out with accidents.
“We have now a roster with depth and flexibility, and that may assist us tackle all of the challenges that might be coming our method,” the U.S. coach, Vlatko Andonovski, mentioned in a press release on Wednesday.
Andonovski, who coached the workforce to a bronze medal on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, has spent the previous few years attempting to rebuild his squad as this match loomed, easing out veterans and introducing new expertise in an effort to construct a workforce that he thinks can win this summer season 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. Simply final week, he misplaced his captain, defender Becky Sauerbrunn, who was dominated out with a lingering foot damage. Different accidents way back value him the providers of Sam Mewis, a midfield fixture of the 2019 World Cup champions, and extra not too long ago the presence of two worthwhile attacking choices, Mallory Swanson, who gave the impression to be peaking on the good time, and Catarina Macario.
Nonetheless, he had a core of stalwarts he may depend on, together with stars like Morgan and Rapinoe, who carry years of worldwide expertise in addition to their gravitas as two of probably 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 provide a well-recognized mixture of grit and flash in midfield.
There might be many new stars, together with Sophia Smith, 22, who was final yr’s Most worthy participant of the Nationwide Ladies’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 Individuals’ first recreation might be July 22 in opposition to Vietnam in Auckland, New Zealand — 9 p.m. Jap time on July 21. That might be adopted by the workforce’s greatest recreation for the reason that final World Cup: a rematch with the opposite 2019 finalist, the Netherlands, that may most likely depart the winner with a a lot simpler path within the knockout stage.
Andonovski may need even shocked himself with among the names he had penciled in. However 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 position mannequin for her teammates: the workforce’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. Different 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 on top of things after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee final yr whereas taking part in in France.
There might be, nonetheless, many acquainted and skilled gamers when Andonovski and his workforce collect for a coaching camp subsequent week in California. Ertz, 10 months after having a child, has stepped straight again into the workforce’s midfield. Crystal Dunn, who gave delivery 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.
Informal 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 workforce captain and daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, might be in line to interchange Sauerbrunn. Savannah DeMelo has by no means performed a world recreation for the nationwide workforce however is having a powerful yr for her N.W.S.L. workforce. 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 referred to as up after Swanson’s damage; she is going to develop into the youngest U.S. girls’s soccer participant at a World Cup since at the very least 2007. The primary draft choose on this yr’s N.W.S.L. draft, she has the vitality, ability and phenomenal velocity to be a generational participant. However 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 workforce that exhibits up in New Zealand may have the swagger of earlier ones. The workforce’s pre-eminence within the girls’s recreation has been below menace from the rising investments, and the rising energy, of rivals in Europe. Final fall, america 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 US nonetheless ranks among the many favorites. However its margin could also be finer than ever.