Category Archives: women’s soccer

Blaim the heroine

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Here is an argument that the Women’s World Cup was not “an unmitigated failure” by the U.S. national team, as Fox Sports commentator and former men’s national player Alexi Lalas called it; that the Americans’ loss to Sweden in the round of 16 would “not be remembered as the day the United States women’s team hit rock bottom,” as it was characterized by a report in The Guardian.

Yes, the Yanks had squeaked into to the knockout round with a win and two ties, and their loss to the Swedes, despite being ranked No. 1 in the world and four times Cup champion, came earlier than in eight previous Cups. So, surprise! That’s sports. That’s part of the lure of it. There is no rubber-stamping a perceived favorite’s success.

And anyone who watched the U.S.-Sweden match had to notice that the Americans controlled the run of play, outshooting the third-ranked Swedes, 21-7. Were it not for the startling, cat-like reflexes of 27-year-old Swedish goalkeeper Zecira Musovic, repeatedly batting away shots ticketed for the back of the net, the Yanks would not have had to endure their own excruciating penalty-shot misses and the necessity of the latest goal-line video technology to confirm Sweden’s ultimate winner, which was not otherwise visible to the naked eye.

Musovic was spectacular, the real difference in a magnificent tug-of-war that went beyond two hours between two skilled, aggressive teams. Her performance was more to the point than so much of the post-match analysis by the sport’s chattering classes bent on assigning blame.

U.S. coach Vlatko Andonovski was widely recommended for dismissal, taken to task for not showing confidence in his bench and assembling a roster that didn’t produce goals, didn’t better manage the midfield, didn’t show more cohesion, etc. Slate called the U.S. team “a shadow of its previous self.” Front Row Soccer enumerated what it judged to be U.S. failures by “looking back on a disaster of a tournament.”

ESPN piled on, too, lamenting the injuries to some American veterans, the drying up of the youth pipeline in the United States compared to the rest of the world, what is perceived as U.S. overconfidence and its players’ “lack of chemistry.” (During a stretch of poor games during the 1999 NBA season, Knicks guard Chris Childs argued that “chemistry is between lovers, not players.”)

Listen: There was a second team involved in that round-of-16 game, and the theatrical display by that other team’s goalkeeper, Musovic, is what repeatedly flummoxed the Americans and eventually put them on desolation row. If any individual must be “blamed” for turning the Yanks’ hearts to stone, that responsibility reasonably (and admiringly) could be attributed to Musovic. That was her job.

All the ferreting out of responsibility—the casting of aspersions on U.S. players, coaches, federation officials and the overall system—smacked of poor sportsmanship, exacerbated by Alexi Lalas’ assertion that the U.S. team had become “unlikeable” because of players’ progressive pronouncements away from the field. Not surprisingly, there were some nasty claims of poetic justice that retiring U.S. forward Megan Rapinoe—who has advocated for LGBTQ rights, equal pay for women in sports and racial justice—missed her penalty attempt.

At the end of a critical summation by The Athletic, which declared “this World Cup has raised massive existential questions about America’s ability to keep moving forward” and cast the result as some sort of apocalypse, someone with a sense of humor commented online, “I blame the Reynas”—aware of the messy aftermath to the men’s World Cup struggles. (Ask your hard-core soccer friends.)

Meanwhile, as the Swedes celebrated their victory, there came through the Melbourne stadium sound system a lively, familiar tune: “Dancing Queen.”

You can dance, you can jive/Having the time of your life.

See that girl/Watch that theme/

She is the Dancing Queen.

That was a No. 1 hit in the United States in the 1970s and lived on on Broadway and the movies. By the Swedish group ABBA.

Mamma Mia!

Inspiration complication

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What Australian soccer star Sam Kerr wished for prior to this women’s World Cup—“a Cathy Freeman moment”—now appears to be an absolute necessity for her team. A wobbly victory over Ireland followed by a crushing loss to Nigeria has left the Aussies—who had entertained expectations of a deep Cup run—in need of Freeman’s long-ago operatic, spellbinding magic just to advance to the tournament’s knockout round.

Kerr was just days past her 7th birthday when Freeman, on Sept. 25, 2000, provided the nation Down Under with a Hollywood ending of exaggerated happiness. So any Australian who pays attention to these sports spectaculars—and anyone lucky enough to have witnessed the 2000 Sydney Olympics—understands the reference.

On what was a grand night of track and field filled with exceptional, dramatic performances in virtually every competition, Freeman’s victory in that Olympic 400-meter final topped all. Not simply because Freeman rendered a smashing stretch run, coming from third place off the final turn in a race that is as close to violence as her sport comes—a tormenting all-out sprint over a quarter mile.

The Aboriginal Freeman was running with the weight of a nation and a people, her country’s most put-upon minority, on her back. Days before, during the Games’ Opening Ceremonies, she had been tasked with the honor of lighting the Olympic flame, a symbol of peace and brotherhood, causing her to worry “what some people would think” about her presence at the heart of the public ritual.

She is the granddaughter of one of Australia’s “stolen children” produced by a shameless national policy that took Aboriginal children and gave them to white families to “be civilized.”

In a way, that made her the conscience of the Sydney Olympics—and of Australia. And led to some incredibly noisy, emotional business in the boomerang event that sends runners out for a simple, exhausting trip, out and back. Fans—there were 112,000 in the stadium—were desperately, vicariously trying to lift Freeman around the track. Flash cameras in the stands followed her around, seeming to turn Freeman into her very own Olympic ceremony.

At the end, Freeman and the two early leaders she passed, straining mightily in the last 50 meters—Jamaica’s Lorraine Graham and Britain’s Katherine Merry—all were left sprawled on the track like survivors from some frightening car accident. Freeman needed several minutes to recover before getting to her feet and walking a victory lap, carrying both the Aboriginal and Australian flags.

It was just a championship race but interpreted by many as theater of “national reconciliation.”

“I don’t like to pass comment on anything political,” Freeman said then. “People like to make me a symbol for all sorts of things. I represent the young Aboriginal person living in a country of unity and enjoying possibilities of everything….

“I share my medal with my husband and my family and whoever else wants can join in.”

Her “moment” has been said to cause a ripple effect inspiring future generations of Aussie athletes in a sports-mad country, still a potent motivational tool—a shining example of grace under pressure. As the 2023 women’s national soccer team players gathered for a pre-tournament session, they were showed a tape of Freeman’s 2000 victory and treated with a surprise appearance by Freeman, who told them, “When you ask yourself, ‘What are you doing here? What are you doing it for?’ It’s because you love who you are and what you’re doing.”

Alas, Kerr—Australia’s career goal-scoring leader and considered among the sport’s top five (at least) global performers—came up lame with a bad calf in a pre-Cup workout and has missed her team’s first two disappointing games. If she can play against a formidable Canada side on Monday, maybe….

Respect for Tiffeny Milbrett

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In the summer of 2001, it was possible to argue that the most accomplished player on any New York professional sports team was 5-foot-2, 130 pounds and female. That was Tiffeny Milbrett, who has just been inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Milbrett was playing for the Long Island-based New York Power in 2001, the inaugural season of the short-lived Women’s United Soccer Association. A feisty attacker, hiccup-quick, she seemed to persistently materialize at the goalmouth, poised to strike. She constantly called for the ball, not in any discernible language but with what her coach and teammates described as a series of squeaks and shrieks and shouts. “The higher the pitch,” Power teammate Christie Pearce said then, “the more she wants the ball.”

Milbrett was the WUSA’s first MVP, its first author of a hat trick and the first season’s scoring leader, yet spent her career—16 years on the U.S. National team; still sixth on the all-time goal scoring list—yearning for the kind of recognition mostly withheld from her while being lavished on so many of her peers. The Mia Hamms. Julie Foudys. Brandy Chastains.

Which didn’t sit especially well with Milbrett, who had picked up the nickname “No Tact Tiff” during her time at the University of Portland, when her 103 goals equaled Hamm’s then-college record. “I earned that,” she said of the handle. “Because of many, many times having foot in mouth. But a lot of times tact is B.S. The truth hurts.”

With Milbrett, there was no beating around the bush, no sugar-coating, just look-you-in-the-eye talk. “Here I was,” she said, “coming onto the national team and going above and beyond those guys and not getting the respect from my coaches and teammates. It took me way too long to get that respect.”

That was the era when the American women shouldered their way into the public sports consciousness with Olympic and World Cup titles. They stirred the passion of countless young girls—the Ponytail Hooligans—and demanded the attention of Nike’s marketing might.

It was Milbrett who produced the gold-medal winning goal at the ’96 Olympics and who led the team in scoring in the 1999 U.S.-based World Cup—the one more widely remembered for Chastain’s off-with-her-shirt penalty-kick celebration. Milbrett still shares the national team record for most goals in a match—five.

There was a 2000 Olympics first-round match in Melbourne, Australia—a 2-0 victory over Norway—that illustrated the relentless threat of a Milbrett score, even as she went about what amounted to a negative hat trick. Dead-eye shooter that she was, it didn’t seem possible she could hit the goal’s woodwork three times in a game if she tried. But she wasn’t trying, and she did.

After giving the U.S. an early 1-0 lead, Milbrett rattled one shot off the right post, one off the crossbar and one off the left post, then rifled another just wide and nearly knocked over the Norwegian keeper with yet another heavy blow. She had come within inches of a six-goal game.

Still, she noticed back then, “the endorsement world looks for this one spitting image, this person next door, this All-American image. This one. This type.”

Not her. But endorsements come and go. The Hall of Fame is a little piece of immortality. There’s no hurt in that truth.

UConn basketball and credit where it’s due

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Allow yourself a rubbernecking moment. It’s a rare thing for any team to go 100 games without losing, so this is a good time to tap the brakes and eyeball various aspects at play in the extraordinary UConn women’s basketball streak.

There is, of course, the victory total itself, something no other college or professional team—men or women—has compiled. The numbers nuts out there recognize how forcefully UConn’s record—up to 101 games by Feb. 18—blows away the 88 straight won by UCLA’s men from 1970 to ’74, the 33 in-a-row by the NBA’s Lakers in 1972, the 47 consecutive college football victories by Oklahoma from 1953 to ’57; the 35-game unbeaten run (with 10 ties) by the NHL’s 1979-’80 Philadelphia Flyers.

Still, there somehow have been so-what reactions. Even, in the case of a Boston sportscaster named Tony Massarotti, a sneering, total dismissal of UConn’s feat, based—counterintuitively—on the argument that too many of the UConn victories were too lopsided. “It doesn’t count,” Massarotti blustered. “Please. What a crock.”

Wait. Might such a take have anything to do with gender?

In 1994, I was dispatched by Newsday to Chapel Hill, N.C., to seek metaphysical and cultural explanations for a situation similar to the current UConn basketball reign. The University of North Carolina women’s soccer team had just lost for the first time in 102 games (with one tie). And lost for only the second time in 204 games over eight years (with another seven ties mixed in).

My clear impression was that Carolina’s players approached their sport in the same way that Hall of Famer Bill Russell tackled his in a 13-year pro career during which he played for 11 NBA champions. Because there is a scoreboard, Russell once said, every athlete obviously plays to win.

The star of that ’94 Carolina soccer team was Tisha Venturini, and what she noticed about her teammates’ reactions, when their 102-game unbeaten streak was ended, didn’t reflect the individuals’ competitive will so much as their distinct personalities. “The ones who usually are emotional were crying hysterically,” Venturini said, “and the ones who never get emotional were just stone-faced.”

The team’s coach then—and now, going into his 39th season—was Anson Dorrance, and it was he who wondered at both the meaning of victory and what he called “the guy thing.”

“In our society,” Dorrance said, “we put too much stock in athletic success and failure. That’s men. Men lose sight of what’s critically important, your reason in life and the quality of your relationships. I think men measure their lives in these kinds of successes and failures. Numbers. Streaks. I think that’s why you see movies of the old high school quarterback pumping gas somewhere, to say: He just had a great arm; it didn’t make him a great man.”

That’s like the Bruce Springsteen lyric about ephemeral eminence…

    I had a friend was a big baseball player back in high school.

    He could throw that speedball by you

    Make you look like a fool, boy.

    Saw him the other night at this roadside bar

    I was walking in, he was walking out.

    We went back inside sat down had a few drinks

    But all he kept talking about was

    Glory days, well they’ll pass you by

    Glory days, in the wink of a young girl’s eye…

Dorrance believed that he was “not a bad loser. One of the things I’ve never been able to accept about sports is that one team has to lose. And yet, I’m best at arranging for other teams to lose. I mean, there’s something wrong with that, philosophically, don’t you think?”

He admitted to being “teed off” by the losses, as astoundingly infrequent as they were, “yet, why does this irritate me that’s I’m teed off? And if it irritates me that I’m teed off, why don’t I sever that part of my personality? Because I don’t want to? Is it just winning that I’m after?”

And is that really just a male trait?

Dorrance claimed that his female players “have taught me their ability to relate…they’ve taught me to be more human.” Yet that didn’t stop them from maintaining an athletic dominance. Since the team materialized in 1979, Carolina has won 22 national championships. “It’s not world peace or cancer research,” Dorrance readily conceded. But there was no getting around the fact that his players’ accomplishments were “impressive. Heck, I’m impressed,” he said.

Just as Carolina occasionally lost in soccer, UConn, at some point, will lose a basketball game. Because there are scoreboards and two teams trying to win. But when a team—any team—wins more than 100 consecutive games, it counts.