Category Archives: women’s world cup

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….

How important are sports heroes?

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There is a whiff of the curmudgeonly in questioning whether a sports team qualifies for the ticker-tape treatment afforded the U.S. women’s soccer champions last week. Especially since those women generated an excitement and admiration in their run to the 2015 World Cup title that was every bit the equal of Yankees and Mets teams similarly celebrated in recent years.

It’s just that witnessing the giddy, noisy procession through flying confetti and adoring crowds prompted ruminations of where athletic achievement belongs on the continuum of heroic deeds. Just how do feats on the playing field stack up against the accomplishments of Einstein, Lindbergh and Earhart; General Eisenhower, Churchill, astronauts and anti-apartheid revolutionaries such as Nelson Mandela—all those previously feted in the Canyon of Heroes?

And what does it tell us that, while a modest 30 of history’s 206 ticker-tape parades over 129 years—quintessential New York City events—have featured sports figures, 10 of the last 11 have honored jocks?

Might it be that society has come to accept that sports luminaries, though they may not rush into burning buildings to save babies, indeed qualify for the slippery title of Hero? There are genuine examples of strong character in sports and the need to face adversity, if not danger. And arguments can be put forth that athletes at times contribute to a greater good, if only in terms of unifying a generally partisan populace.

Plus, there is a significant precedent for such worship, at least as a pleasant distraction from larger issues. Romario, Brazil’s soccer star of the early 1990s, once described his national team’s success as a “plate of food” for his countrymen who were constantly battling poverty and inflation. President Franklin Roosevelt, in a letter to baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis one month after Pearl Harbor, urged that the sport “keep going” through war, to provide beleaguered citizens’ a “chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.”

So the tut-tutting over a $2 million parade for that band of 23 female athletes will be happily held in abeyance here, reinforced by a long-ago chat on this topic with Johann Olav Koss, the former Olympic speedskating champion from Norway who has spent his post-competitive years promoting sports for children in war-torn and disadvantaged lands.

His work—he is CEO of an organization called Right to Play—grew out of a trip to Eritrea, a tiny African nation that had just won a 31-year war of independence from Ethiopia in 1993, the year before Koss’ repeated gold-medal triumphs at the Lillehammer Olympics.

“In Eritrea,” Koss said, “there were posters of soldiers who had died in the war, hanging along the street, and a group of 10-year-olds stopped in front of a poster to admire these dead soldiers. You could tell, these soldiers were the heroes of Eritrea. But then a group of cyclists came through the street, and those kids turned around and were screaming after the cyclists, cheering them. And I was wondering, ‘What kind of heroes do we want?’

“I want it to be athletes as opposed to soldiers. Isn’t it something to have somebody good to look up to?”

Athletes, Koss convincingly argued, “are very good role models. When you’ve dedicated yourself to play fair—that is very important—then it’s totally enough to be a hero in sport.”

Among Koss’ travels, bringing sports equipment, health services and counseling to kids subjected to war’s trauma, was a stop in Rwanda to set up a sports festival.

“Kids there had lost limbs,” he said, “legs and arms, from land minds and being cut up by machetes. And they had crude prostheses made of wood. There was this 4-year-old girl, with a beautiful dress, the most beautiful blue dress, with a wooden leg. But she was running, and she had so much fun doing this. And you say, ‘How important is this?’ Even in the cruelty, this is so important. As an athlete, I was so proud that sports could help. It was a great thing.”

So, forgive the temporary urge to dismiss a soccer championship as something frivolous in a troubled world. It was a great thing. And the parade was good fun.

Who won the Women’s World Cup?

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Apparently, the United States has won the Women’s World Cup soccer title for the third time in the history of the seven global tournaments. Except the champs who bludgeoned Japan, 5-2, on the July 4th weekend appeared to be representing some mysterious land that flies a white, black and neon green flag.

flag

Or, very possibly, the Nation of Nike.

The Americans’ raiment was so counterintuitive that, when the duds were introduced in April, a Nike vice president, Charlie Brooks, had to scramble to the outfitter’s defense by claiming the uniforms were meant to “paint inspiration for the team itself—something crisp, stylish, sharp, strong and impactful, like the team itself.”

green

But, neon green? Rally ‘round the shoe company? Ev’ry heart beats fine/’neath the white, black and lime?

In international sports, nationalism can get a bit haywire at times and morph into an unattractive jingoism that denigrates the Other Side. Nevertheless, those keenly skilled American women were, after all, members of the U.S. National Team. Their fans, who dominated the large crowds at the various Canadian Cup venues, logically draped themselves in red, white and blue flag motifs.

Typically, even those national teams that eschew their flag look tend to opt for hues with significant links to their homelands. Italy (red, green and white flag) wears blue—the Azzurri—because blue is the official color of the Royal House of Savoy, under which Italy was united in the 19th Century. The Netherlands (red, white and blue flag) wears orange, the traditional color of the Dutch monarchy and a symbol of national unity.

I’m of the conviction that U.S. teams—as suggested long ago by my friend John Powers of the Boston Globe—should outfit themselves like Apollo Creed in the old “Rocky” films. All stars and stripes, a little like the 1994 U.S. men’s soccer team.

creed199494

Instead, the women’s attire in this World Cup reminded that it has been some time since Nike, the sportswear-and-equipment beast, began dictating uniform colors and, in the process, providing a glimpse into the dark shades of Nike’s voracious capitalist heart. By assuring that traditional colors wear out before your souvenir shirt does, Nike can increase its sales. The retail tail wags the on-field dog.

So black is the new blue, neon green the new red. (And subject to change.) Is this the kind of thing that Yale law professor Charles Reich was warning about in his 1970 book, “The Greening of America”? “The corporate state,” he argued, “is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.”

book

Paul Lukas, the sports uniform maven who runs the Uni Watch web site that obsesses over team logos and color combinations, told me several years ago that, in this marketing era, “the first question [uniform designers] ask is, ‘How is this going to sell at the team shop or Modells?’”

Lukas called this all part of the “video-game-ization of sports, the superhero-ization of sports. Superheroes don’t wear uniforms. They wear costumes.”

OK, superheroes: Time for a revolution. Storm the Nike barricades. Take back the nation’s colors.