Abby Wambach has an indomitable will. She has the ability to raise her game when the stakes are higher. She works hard and inspires others to do the same.
But let’s remember one thing: She’s also a danged good soccer player.
Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s too easy to forget. Too easy to think of her accomplishments as a simple function of a single-minded willingness to stick her head wherever it must be to meet the ball. Just as Brian McBride was called “McHead” — sometimes affectionately, sometimes not — in deference to his ability to score goals with his noggin and take a few facial reconstructions to do so, Wambach’s general soccer skill is overlooked as people marvel over the intangibles that sportswriters and ad agencies build into mythology.
Wambach, first of all, is perfectly capable of scoring magnificent goals without her head. Heading (sorry) into 2013, she had only used her head for 66 of her 152 goals.
Look at this:
Now consider this: This year, Wambach passed (geez, another horrible accidental pun) Tiffeny Milbrett for third place on the all-time assist list. (She’s roughly 40 behind Kristine Lilly and 80 behind Mia Hamm, so let’s not restart the #ChasingMia hashtag just yet.)
Some of those were surely with her head. To repeat myself: I’m not sure TV does justice to her ability to flick the ball into the path of an onrushing teammate with her head.
So let’s finish up by talking about her aerial ability. First of all, it’s not always that high in the air. Sure, she can outjump people to score. But she’s just as likely to score on a diving header, which requires an uncanny sense of timing.
Even if that was Wambach’s FIRST goal, not her 158th, you’d have to say she’s a skilled player.
So as U.S. Soccer (women’s and men’s) tries to change its approach to develop more skillful players, not just athletes, Abby Wambach is and will continue to be someone to emulate.
Yesterday’s Sydney Leroux saga had a few predictable outcomes. Late in the day, we heard Leroux wasn’t specifically talking about the game in Toronto on Sunday — in fact, she says the atmosphere there was great! “A positive step forward for women’s soccer,” even.
Of course, by then, it was too late for the Toronto crowd. Many of the mainstream media stories on the web have been updated with Leroux’s clarification — she was talking about an older game in Vancouver, plus Twitter — but a lot of headlines still reflect what her tweet implied: The crowd in Toronto was using racist chants against her.
To respond to one of yesterday’s comments — I don’t see such accusations as “minutiae.” I’d rather be called a bleepity-bleep whatever than a racist. I’ve been called a racist before. It hurts. It cuts to your soul. It is not an accusation to be tossed around lightly and then say, “Oh, I meant those OTHER guys.”
So that’s one lesson learned, and it’s one of many excellent points in Richard Whittall’s column, “Some lessons from the Leroux saga.”
Another lesson is aimed squarely at Canadian fans, in response to attitudes like this:
I’m not going to walk around asking Canadian players what they think of their fans tossing out the c-word and b-word. They shouldn’t have to confront this themselves. Those of us with Y chromosomes should simply know better.
As Whittall put it:
That the rest of the world has set a low bar in acceptable bounds of player abuse isn’t a great reason for Canadian or American fans of womens soccer to do the same.
I’m also still befuddled by people trotting out the notion that this sort of thing happens in men’s soccer all the time, so there’s some sort of double-standard in place. “Balotelli does it” is one of those arguments. Yes, and Balotelli is one the most controversial, if not the most reviled, soccer players in the world.
Europe offers plenty of soccer traditions to emulate. Balotelli’s behavior and fans hurling sexist epithets aren’t among them. Or maybe one day we’ll end borrowing another European tradition — forcing teams to play in empty stadiums.
So, moving forward, we can hope Leroux will quit throwing gasoline on the fire with poorly chosen celebrations and poorly focused accusations. She has made plenty of enemies of non-racist, non-abusive Canadian fans who may have defended her in the past.
But as fans, we all need to take a step back and think about the limits of our fan passions. The Voyageurs immediately spoke out against racism, and that’s terrific. It’s not, however, the end of the conversation about what’s acceptable in the stands.
Crash Davis, Bull Durham: What are you doing? Huh? What are you doing standing here? I gave you a gift, you stand here showing up my pitcher? Run, dummy!
Sports have written rules and unwritten rules. The written rules tell you the size of the field, what to do when a ball becomes defective in the course of play, what sort of socks aren’t acceptable, etc. The unwritten rules tell us so much more:
1. Hockey fights stay on the ice. The book The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHLhad all sorts of amusing anecdotes, my favorite being the one in which the guy losing a fight yells, “Loser buys the pizza.” The guy who’s winning says, “Well, I think you’re buying.” Then the losing fighter yells, “Yeah, but the winner buys the beer!”
Then there’s this, in which a veteran hockey enforcer gives an opponent a chance to impress his coaches:
I’m not saying the code makes a whole lot of sense. But it exists.
2. When a soccer player is down on the field, someone will kick the ball out of play so the trainers can run on the field. Then the ball is returned to the other side. That’s not in the written rules. Players do that on their own.
If you missed yesterday’s arguments after the USA-Canada women’s soccer match in Toronto, here’s the deal: Former Canadian U20 U19* striker Sydney Leroux, who has endured all sorts of abuse on Twitter and heard it from the crowd all day yesterday, scored a garbage-time goal for the USA and celebrated by waving the USA badge at the crowd and shushing them.
Canadian commentators weren’t happy. “Classless,” said Craig Forrest on TV. At TSN’s site, Gareth Wheeler summed up the unwritten rule in this case:
An act as such is an absolute no-no in soccer. You don’t pay homage to the badge against your former team, let alone the country of your birth.
This rule was at the heart of yesterday’s Twitter arguments. A lot of WoSo fans insisted that they’ve seen men celebrating the same way, taunting fans, etc. Two issues with that:
1. It’s rare to see players doing such things, as Wheeler says, “against your former team, let alone the country of your birth.”
2. If, say, an English-born player did while playing for Scotland against England, that just might make the news. The ensuing riot certainly would. And you’d have plenty of English commentators calling the act “classless” or worse. I couldn’t find specific examples, but I think that’s because it just isn’t done. More common is the example of Polish-born German player Lukas Podolski, who scored twice against Poland in Euro 2008 and refused to celebrate at all.
So as with a lot of Hope Solo’s controversies, the “sexist double standard” argument doesn’t hold water. (And as someone who greatly appreciates men’s AND women’s soccer, I get rather irritated with false stereotypes in either direction, and then I tweet too much and get unfollowed by a bunch of disgruntled people. Sorry about that, though I’d also suggest getting Hootsuite and making a few lists so you can tune it out when some people in your feed start a lively discussion that you’re not enjoying. In any case, I’ll wrap it up more quickly in the future so you don’t have to adjust your timelines. All that said, I found a lot of the discussion helpful as I tried to clarify the situation, so thanks to those who stuck around.)
I haven’t seen much reaction from Canadian players (if you see more, please leave it in the comments). But here’s Christine Sinclair:
“Maybe not the classiest of moves,” Sinclair said of Leroux’s gesture. “She scored on us and an individual can do what they like. I probably wouldn’t have done the same, but we move on.”
Did the celebration arguments overshadow the game? Well, yes. But aside from Alex Morgan’s superb goals and the solid defense of 17-year-old Canadian Kadeisha Buchanan, it wasn’t much of a game. Canada brought a lot of emotion but little else.
Now in front of a boisterous sell-out crowd at BMO Field on Sunday afternoon, they tried to muscle the Americans out of their rhythm. This was a planned assault, and as plodding as that sounds.
Tactically, it was smart. Aesthetically, it was turgid. Functionally, it was useless.
The atmosphere was promising. The passion many WoSo fans have yearned to see at their stadiums was finally there. I thought it was clever to hear fans counting to six, a reference to the puzzling free kick that helped the USA in that Olympic semifinal, every time U.S. goalkeeper Nicole Barnhart had the ball.
So if you want me to respond to a comment, do it here. Out of deference to those who are done talking about this, I’m not going to bring it up again on Twitter.
I think the last word on Twitter should go to Heather Mitts:
Life isn't fair, get use to it. Control what you can control & don't sweat the small stuff. Oh and mean people suck. #deepthoughts
Postscript: As I was writing this post, Sydney Leroux started a tweet with “When you chant racial slurs.” Plenty of Canadians, including some I know to have been at the game, vehemently deny they heard anything of that nature. If she heard it from one person one time, of course, that’s too much. But in light of Boston Breakers fans (ironically, Leroux’s NWSL team) being unfairly smeared as racist in a fairly prominent book, I’m not about to do the same thing to Canadian fans. I think we can agree that the overwhelming majority, somewhere between 95 and 99.99 percent of people in BMO, would abhor such things.
Sure, I’ve seen the video in which one guy is recorded yelling a couple of nasty (sexist, not racist, not that one is “better” than the other) words. That’s bad. But that’s not a “chant.” A chant involves many people saying and repeating the same thing.
I can’t say Leroux heard absolutely nothing, and I’m sure she’s received all sorts of abuse from random racist morons on Twitter. I don’t mean to diminish that or excuse it. But I’m not going to give any credence to the thought that racism was widespread at BMO yesterday until someone produces evidence to the contrary.
Now back to the NWSL, where we’re still taking up a collection to pay the fines of Seattle staffers complaining about a call that was, indeed, quite wrong.
*Correction: Leroux played youth soccer for Canada before FIFA adjusted its age ranges. She was on Canada’s U19 World Championship team in 2004. Some trivia: Her teammates included Robyn Gayle, Sophie Schmidt, Emily Zurrer, Jodi-Ann Robinson and Golden Boot winner Brittany Timko. Among the U.S. players: Ashlyn Harris, Rachel Buehler, Stephanie (Lopez) Cox, Becky Sauerbrunn, Amy Rodriguez, Yael Averbuch, Nikki Krzyzik, Angie Woznuk and Megan Rapinoe. Other teams: Veronica Boquete (Spain), Simone Laudehr (Germany), Celia Okoyino da Mbabi (Germany) and Marta (Brazil).
Germany needed a late equalizer and penalties to get past Nigeria in the quarterfinals, but the high-scoring team beat the USA 3-1 in the semifinals and took the title against China 2-0. Third-place game: USA 3, Brazil 0. The highlight for Canada: Coming back from 3-0 down to draw Germany 3-3 in group play.
Hope Solo is indeed on the list to play in the National Women’s Soccer League, likely ending (at least for now) any speculation that she may choose another path. So is Heather Mitts, all indications of retirement to the contrary.
From that 2012 stats page, subtract one: Stephanie Cox, who’s pregnant. Add Ashlyn Harris and Keelin Winters, who are also in the official U.S. Soccer site’s player pool.
That player pool only has 29 players. Twenty-three will be allocated. Cox is pregnant. Jeff Kassouf reports that Meghan Klingenberg is staying in Sweden for now. Yael Averbuch also is staying there. Whitney Engen is in England. That leaves the two Class of 2012 players who’ll surely be high on the draft board next week — Kristie Mewis and Christine Nairn, who has already graduated from Penn State.
Not officially listed in the player pool but certainly under national team consideration is Christen Press. She’s … staying in Sweden.
So if there are no surprises, it’s only because the player pool is so small. And it includes everyone who played for the USWNT in 2011 and 2012 except Lindsay Tarpley and Brittany Taylor. Even if you go back to 2010, you only add six names: Sarah Huffman, Casey Nogueira, Meghan Schnur, Cat Whitehill, the retired Kate Markgraf and the really retired Kristine Lilly.
And that small player pool is the reason the USWNT needs a domestic league. You don’t want to be two injuries away from calling in people who aren’t playing at an elite level.
Too many important reads today to leave it all on Twitter:
1. Charles Boehm puts the timeline of a new league announcement at or before Dec. 1.
2. What’s taking so long? Andy Crossley investigates and comes up with most of the answers.
3. Jerramy Stevens is out of court, but police are still investigating his incident with fiancee Hope Solo, Kelly Whiteside reports.
To put the Solo timeline in perspective, check the bonus chapter from her book, released online. Adrian, the man who had been with her through a lot of difficult times, was still with her family when the U.S. won gold in August. What has happened in the last three months? I have no idea, and I’m not speculating.
The soccer-related question is this: Is Solo going to play in the new league?
New U.S. women’s soccer coach Tom Sermanni didn’t break out into song. Nor did he start calling out rival soccer coaches.
Instead, Sermanni came across as a level-headed guy who seems to appreciate the complexities of his new job without rushing to judgment on how he wants to proceed.
He wants to play a positive, attacking style, continuing the efforts Pia Sundhage made to eliminate “kickball” (in the words of Mark Ziegler).
“The game’s changing at a rapid pace,” he said in response to Brian Straus’s question about whether he needed to overhaul the team or just keep a steady hand on the helm of the fastest boat in the fleet. In other words, Sermanni knows every team, no matter how good, will have to evolve.
And he’s going to keep an open mind about the player pool. Asked about integrating young players, Sermanni said he wants to have greater competition not just from the U-20s on their way up but players already IN their 20s. If you have a particular favorite from WPS who never got much of a chance under Pia, that has to be heartwarming.
But he hastened to say he hasn’t made any decisions yet. He doesn’t know if he’ll start a drastically different side in his first home friendly. He’s not rushing to push out Shannon Boxx or Christie Rampone, saying he’s not going to make decisions based on “chronological age.”
Basically, he managed to come across as open-minded without being ignorant. Impressive.
We’ll see how long of a honeymoon period he gets — my guess is it’ll tough for him to pick a roster that offends no one on Twitter — but he came across quite well in this first impression. Friendly, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and sincere.
Too bad women’s soccer doesn’t have a major offyear tournament. (Copa America for whole Western Hemisphere would be fun.)
Tom Sermanni is, on paper, the most impressive candidate the U.S. women’s soccer team has ever had as head coach.
The U.S. women have never had an experienced international coach on the bench. After Anson Dorrance stepped down, the USA has had a steady succession of assistant coaches moving up — Tony DiCicco, April Heinrichs and Greg Ryan. That line of succession ended with Pia Sundhage, a head coach at youth national level in Sweden and a club coach with the Boston Breakers (WUSA version) and KIF Orebro in Sweden. (And, like Sundhage, Sermanni was a WUSA head coach.)
Sermanni was Australia’s head coach from 1994 to 1997, then again for the past eight years. That includes two World Cup quarterfinal appearances with a perpetually young team. As Julie Foudy put it:
Tom Sermanni's avg age w Australia was about 12 yrs old so he'll b able 2 navigate needed phase of adding youth 2 experiencd #uswnt.
Foudy also has tweeted plenty of compliments about Sermanni — “GRT coach and GRT human being” — and she elaborated by email: “I have known him for many years and think he is a great coach. And that he is a player’s manager type of coach. But is a strong personality who can also “crack the whip” (quote from many of current players) as many of the current players want.”
ESPN’s Adrian Healey had an interesting thought on how Sermanni might be able to deal with the large personalities on the U.S. squad:
For evidence on how Tom Sermanni handles "difficult" players, see how he got the best out of Lisa De Vanna for Australia #USWNT
Most other folks in the women’s soccer community seem happy with the hire. Then there’s Philip Hersh, veteran Olympic sports journalist for the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. His take:
US soccer takes step backward by hiring a man (and a foreigner) to replace Pia Sundhage as women's national team coach http://t.co/hV1Urg2R
Hersh echoes Christine Brennan’s recent thoughts on the matter, though Brennan took more of a long-term view:
In a nation of 314 million people, with millions of girls and women playing or having played soccer, if not one of them is deemed good enough to lead the U.S. women’s national team in 2012, isn’t that a terrible indictment of the feeder system for girls and women in leadership positions in the game?
That’s a legitimate long-term question. That said, U.S. Soccer has now placed women — April Heinrichs and Jill Ellis — in charge of that very feeder system. Heinrichs, Ellis and Carin Gabarra are in charge of a sprawling effort to develop women’s soccer from the youth level up, with full-time youth national coaches on the way. They’re setting the tone for U.S. women’s soccer for years or decades to come.
Sermanni should fit well with both the long-term and short-term vision. He surely gets the long-term goal of developing players with breathtaking skill with ball at their feet. But, like Pia Sundhage, he surely understands that a team with the world’s best target forward (Abby Wambach) should make sure she gets a few chances to get her head on the ball in the box. (Hey, crossing like Megan Rapinoe is a skill, too.)
As for the importance of having a woman on the sideline in 2013 and beyond, I’d have to defer to those whose words and deeds carry a bit more weight. There’s Foudy, who isn’t exactly a Title IX opponent. Then there’s Mia Hamm and Danielle Slaton, half of the coaching search committee.
The concerns about developing women’s coaching talent in the long term are legit. But for now, there’s one symbol far more important — the USA’s first World Cup trophy since 1999. (No pressure or anything …)
Before delving back into the Paralympics and everything else in the Myriad world today, I wanted to ask a question based on a thought-provoking email I received:
What if Hope Solo had NOT been benched in the 2007 World Cup? What would’ve happened in that game and in her career?
I may chime in later, but I want to hear from others first …
If you want to know the difficulties U.S. women’s soccer would face if WPS disappeared, ask Canada.
The Canadian national team that faced the Washington Freedom last weekend was called together from all corners of the globe. American college soccer, WPS, the W-League, the Bundesliga and Scandinavia. The lack of cohesiveness showed, and the result flattered the visitors. Canada tied the Freedom 3-3, getting the two goal they needed for the tie while the Freedom’s defensive subs were getting acclimated. The balance of play went to the WPS side, not the national team.
“This looked like the first time the team was together,” said Canadian coach Carolina Morace, a pioneer of the game who scored 105 goals for Italy.
Morace sees several reasons for the disjointed play, one rather simple: “Unfortunately, we don’t have the league in Canada. And for us, this is a big problem. If you don’t play every Saturday or Sunday, you can’t have the rhythm of the game.”
Canadian goalkeeper Erin McLeod played for the Freedom in the friendly between her club and country, but she shared Morace’s frustration.
“Aside from Brazil, we’re the only team in the top 10 of the rankings without a domestic league,” she says. “It’s challenging. We’re spread all over the world. To get everyone together is difficult financially.”
A few days later, Canada fell from 10th to a tie for 11th in FIFA’s rankings. But the point is valid. Little is known about seventh-ranked North Korea, though at least one report suggests that talented players are shepherded into clubs at an early age. Japan has a women’s league entering its third decade and sometimes attracting offseason American players. European leagues are only getting better, with a formalized Champions League in place as extra incentive.
WPS has a solid claim to be the best league in the world, a huge advantage for the U.S. national team. And that’s one of many reasons why this week’s news out of St. Louis is so disturbing.
Abandoned by a couple of mysterious investors, with its last payroll met by bond money released by WPS, St. Louis Athletica has shut down in the middle of a season. The players — including U.S. mainstays Hope Solo, Shannon Boxx and Lori Chalupny — will become free agents next week. (WPS isn’t running a dispersal draft because the contracts were held through Athletica, not the league. The Los Angeles Sol situation in the offseason was different because the league had taken over the team.)
The situation in St. Louis is unique, to put it mildly. Jeff Cooper had been the driving force behind everything in St. Louis — the long-running MLS bid, AC St. Louis of the nascent second-division NASL, and a reshaping of youth clubs in the region. Somewhere along the way, new investors Sanjeev and Heemal Vaid became the team’s majority owners.
Fake Sigi traces the story of Cooper and the Vaid brothers (and son? See Fake Sigi’s report) in a compelling roundup of news reports that leads us to ask a Watergate-style question: Who knew what, when?
WPS, it appears, knew nothing. Goal.com: “Cooper was the sole owner of Athletica, and appeared to have brought on those investors without properly bringing it to the attention of the WPS.” That matches other information I’ve received, and I’ve left messages seeking Cooper’s comment on the matter.
Cooper released a statement — notably absent from Athletica’s site — pinning the blame squarely on the Vaid brothers: “The investors who defaulted on a contract to fund Athletica through this season and beyond broke a promise to a league, team, players and a community, and that is what is most troubling about today’s development.”
What’s happening in St. Louis isn’t happening elsewhere in WPS. Unlike MLS, WPS has no overarching single-entity structure. The Boston Breakers and Washington Freedom shouldn’t be diminished by the dissolution of Los Angeles and St. Louis, just as Portsmouth’s financial problems shouldn’t reflect poorly on Fulham or Manchester United.
But in a league with minimal mainstream media coverage aside from team closures, perception can become reality. Brian Straus, who covered the Freedom in the WUSA days (2001-03), points to the problem: “It’s hard to take the WPS seriously at this point, and even harder to imagine that anyone else will step forward and view women’s soccer in the U.S. as a good investment.”
That’s a little harsh, and it’s worth noting that WPS 2010 has more active investors than MLS 2001, when the league was on the brink and was held up by three owners. Ratings on Fox Soccer Channel (the story uses households — viewership numbers are higher) are just fine for a league of modest ambitions. But it’s fair to say future sponsors will have plenty of questions. So will fans.
The counterargument is that the league will be stronger once it sheds investors who can’t or won’t fulfill the teams’ needs. Like a business that makes painful but necessary cuts, perhaps the league will be better off without trying to prop up a failing club, as Jeff Kassouf points out.
On the field, the game is healthy and significantly better.
“Ten years ago, when I was playing with Canada, everyone would boot it into the box and hope for the best,” McLeod says. “Now it’s constantly evolving and challenging for everyone.
Morace agrees that the game is more sophisticated, but she doesn’t see a transcendent figure. “Mia Hamm, there is not,” she says.
Perhaps not, but the U.S. team is looking quite good these days. Though Cat Whitehill says the disorganized German team the USA dismantled 4-0 last weekend “weren’t Germany,” the rout of the second-ranked team in the world was impressive. Germany may have the second-best women’s league in the world, and its national-team players have stayed in Germany to prepare for next year’s Women’s World Cup on home soil.
Next year, if Germany has a fully functioning women’s league and the USA doesn’t, advantage Germany.
At this point, there’s no reason to think that would be the case. But a show of force from investors, sponsors and fans wouldn’t hurt.
Duresport.com 