A Knot in My Stomach after USA vs. Colombia
22 June 2015
9:30p PT
Round of 16
The bus eased to a stop at the airport, I wasn’t flying anywhere but I wish I had been. In that moment I would’ve taken a midnight plane going anywhere. Midnight planes are not uncommon in Brazil. I knew my heartbeat would transition from Electric Daisy Carnival to Nina Simone at some point during the evening. The emptiness would be replaced by memories and joy, new friendships and adventures. But not yet. I [foolishly] started walking. I have a good sense of direction. If I could just get to the water, I could follow the Atlantic 3 or 5 miles back to my Airbnb in Vilas do Atlantico. Walking and water have always helped me to clear my head. The walk proved to be less safe and significantly longer than I anticipated. And the wind-knocked-out-of-you feeling hadn’t subsided by the time I arrived at my host family’s stoop. That was 51 weeks ago outside of Salvador, Brazil.
Tonight I’m once again by the water, this time at my home by the Pacific Ocean in Playa del Rey, CA before I venture to Canada next week to rendezvous with the USWNT and thousands of their supporters on their quest for glory, for immortality. The thing about that feeling that I haven’t been able to fully wrap my head around until tonight is that it wasn’t a product of the result, of the loss; it was a product of the vacuum that was created after the opportunity to achieve something special was missed.
The country collectively held our breath, in Salvador and in every city and town as the game extended to the final moments, into overtime. The country was primed for an eruption. Just as they are now in support of the American women.
Shortly after the game tonight, the FIFA Player of the Century, Michelle Akers went on Glenn Crooks’s show on SiriusXM FC and was immediately quoted as saying:
USMNT players and others came out of the woodwork in defense of the 2–0 victory of Colombia. “A goal is a goal. A win is a win. Onto the next one.” Alejandro Bedoya tweeted at me. The battle lines were being drawn. Members of the media will help shape this narrative over the next 12–72 hours. That angst is creeping back in, my heart rate is quickening and I suddenly need to go, anywhere, away from my phone, away from my computer, I hear the water.
Michelle, the eat-pray-love-footballers-who-stay-up-into-the-night-to-watch-our-U20s-compete-in-New-Zealand, the moderately vested, the soccer moms and dads and the casual fan alike, we don’t want to choose sides. We’re not mad about the result, Abby’s penalty (credit to Abby for her candor; “I just shanked it.”) or the yellow cards or even Abby’s comments about the yellow cards which were more amusing than upsetting. It’s just not what we were expecting. In a quote sheet after the US won the Algarve Cup, we saw Hope’s comments that “We’re on the right track to peak for the World Cup which is still three months away.” We glossed over Jill’s comments:
“I said to them at the beginning of camp, it’s really about finding ways to win and, sometimes you have to find ways to win when you don’t play well. Sometimes you win pretty or ugly. This has to be our mindset moving forward to gain the advantage.” -Jill Ellis, 11 March 2015
Plenty of soccer beat writers have written stories about the USWNT’s struggles.
And the debate rages (outside the bubble) about how to solve the challenges this team faces. This isn’t the first time tactics or substitution patterns have been questioned. My father, Fox Sports Commentator and ’99 Women’s World Cup Champion Coach Tony DiCicco, often tells the story of a player I have not heard mentioned one single time so far during this event, who was glossed over in both Dare to Dream (HBO) and the 99ers, who didn’t become a household name or sign major endorsement deals but has and continues to be one of those people who embodied professionalism (and continues to as a DOC) and time and again took every opportunity to deliver. Shannon MacMillan could have been a starter in ’99. Maybe she should have been a starter in ’99. When discussing the ’95 WWC, my father candidly states:
“I made a huge mistake in 1995. I cut Shannon MacMillan.”
By 1999, people were paying attention. A lot of people were paying attention. Without Twitter and Facebook perhaps the group think was less pervasive but men and women alike debated women’s soccer in the United States, something that had never happened before and had hardly been conceivable.
Articles were written, Mac had a claim as a starter. But more important than that was that, the team was building. They weren’t playing to win their group or for a good showing. Only one thing mattered, winning the World Cup.
The expectations were set by US Soccer President Alan Rothenburg and Secretary General Hank Steinbrecher and everyone was on board.
Coming back to the beginning of the Jill Ellis era, May 17, 2014 and current US Soccer President Sunil Gulati re-set the expectations, after 3 consecutive failures, “The job description is to win next summer.” And Jill accepted “I know the expectation — embrace the expectation. When you work for US Soccer, it’s about winning gold medals and being on the first-place podium.”
So Jill’s been saying for 13 months, “I’ve got it. I’ll deliver you the World Cup” and then she retreats into the US Soccer bubble. The team disperses to play a few games with the NWSL, comes together for some send off games, some media availability and then they go back about their business. They have their eye on the prize. But so does Michelle, so do the casual fans who didn’t know Jill Ellis’s name until Rob Stone and Jenny Taft introduced her in Winnipeg on Fox earlier this month.
So there’s a disconnect. And the disconnect gets worse in the echo chamber that is our social media (as much as I love twitter and I do, I feel very fortunate to be writing this on the west coast, long after most of the country has gone to bed for the evening). Michelle’s comments in full make more sense:
“Well what I was thinking about when Tony was talking about the team and how he would play and he’s frustrated he invested a lot of his heart and soul — blood, sweat and tears, all of that — into that team. And so did I and so did lots of other people. And so it’s not just about ‘hey, you know Jill said she was going to do it this way and she’s not’ or ‘Our team isn’t playing well.’ It’s about — that’s me out there, that’s my team. So when we struggle or when, in our opinion, the coach isn’t handling the personnel right, the lineup sucks, the subs are sketchy, we’re not all on the same page — that’s me out there. And I can feel it with Tony too, we take it personal you know because that’s our baby out there too, so that’s part of it.
The other part of it is, yeah, because we expect, we know the US can overpower and be more talented, more physical and be the best team hands down on any given day. We know that should be. So to see us struggle, again is frustrating because why aren’t we? We should be. So I think that’s part of it too. So when I say, ‘Hey man, I’ll take an ugly World Cup win’ I’m dealing with the now. And the now is we don’t have all our pieces together, we aren’t performing at our best, some of our coaching decisions are unexplainable. If she’s pleased with the way we played tonight, then what the hell is she doing coaching our US team?”
And there it is, the expectations that Jill has (“I’ll take 2-nil any day in the game”) and what Akers and many others want don’t matter to her or her team. And that’s okay when you win. If we win the World Cup grinding out results (and this defense may just be able to do it) no one will complain about that outcome. But it comes back to that unsettled feeling that I had at the beginning of the night. The biggest shame isn’t that we didn’t score a goal on par with France’s team goal yesterday, it’s that Jill’s expectations, the game plan has not been communicated to the rest of us. “We’re not all on the same page” as Akers said.
So does that matter? You’ll have to decide and tell me. But before I finish up and take the dog for a walk by the ocean, I’ll leave you with one thought and one story:
The thought is that you want to create a wave, a groundswell of support. That requires buy-in. From the players and staff, who seem very much on board, but also from the soccer community and ultimately from the casual public, from America. I may write about this more another night, but we haven’t gotten that piece right, not in Brazil and so far not in Canada. It’s the key that unlocks an energy that can only be described as magical. In 1999, I had a front row seat and I’m quite certain it’s the closest I’ll ever come to being burned by the flame.
But all is not lost, the television ratings are excellent, American support is solid (Sunil tweeted earlier that he expected a full stadium in Ottawa on Friday) and the story I want to leave you with is about a 7 year old boy from Boulder, Colorado. His mother and I were texting earlier about the game and my stress levels and she told me this:
“Honestly, don’t be so stressed. Not about this. I know you’re very invested but my son, Jake is doing a WWC Panini album. And tonight he is watching the anthem and he yells, ‘Mommy! That’s Becky Sauerbrunn! And there’s Alex Morgan! The only pro athlete my son has ever been able to recognize or name is Peyton Manning. THIS IS A LARGE DEVELOPMENT. He’s paying attention and he knows them. I mean Becky Sauerbrunn, I almost passed out from shock.”
This put a big smile on my face and was an excellent reminder. We are in the quarterfinals of the World Cup. We do have a tremendous squad of talented, dedicated, personable, articulate, strong women representing our country. And I know I speak for millions of others when I say, I am proud to have them represent me.
But I’ll remind Jill and the team, the challenge on Friday against China is not only to win, but it’s also to unify and inspire a country. The two are not mutually exclusive.
