With more teams than ever in field, plenty of mysteries are unfolding at Women’s World Cup.
Expanded field for Cup keeps coaches busy
It is not uncommon, even if one knows quite a bit about international soccer, to know very little about the women’s national teams of Ivory Coast and Thailand. So Germany coach Silvia Neid admits freely that she was in the dark when they were put in her first-round group for this summer’s Women’s World Cup.
“To be honest, we knew very little about both teams at the draw,” she said in an interview before the tournament.
It didn’t matter much — Germany thrashed Ivor y Coast, 10-0, Sunday and most likely will do something similar to Thailand next Monday — but Neid acknowledged that there remained a professional obligation to at least have an idea what might be coming from every opponent. (Thailand, for example, seemed to catch Norway by surprise with its speed Sunday, nearly scoring a stunning goal on a counterattack only minutes into what would become an easy 4-0 victory for the Norwegians.)
In the age of an expanded Women’s World Cup, which this year grew to 24 teams for the first time, Neid and Germany are not alone. This year’s tournament across Canada includes eight teams — one-third of the field — making World Cup debuts. The new faces include not only the Thais and Ivorians but upand-coming European teams like Spain and the Netherlands.
Japan, the defending champion, was grouped with three newcomers in the first round: Switzerland, Cameroon and Ecuador.
Every national team program has its own method of keeping up with scheduled and potential opponents, but not all have the resources to do as much scouting as they would like. Instead, some coaches lean on a global network of friends and col- leagues, but also on television broadcasts, online video clips and invaluable visits to regional or international tournaments.
In the most extreme cases, there is always oldschool espionage. Coach Pia Sundhage of Sweden said that several years ago, when she was coaching the U.S. women’s team, she had a friend from her days working in China help sneak her into a closeddoor scrimmage to get a peek at North Korea’s team before the 2011 World Cup.
“It wasn’ t perfect,” Sundhage said. “But in that situation, you take what you can get.”
The best way to level the playing field in women’s soccer is through the one thing many teams do not have enough of: money. Established teams like the United States, Canada, Germany and France are effectively professional organizations with their own coaching and training staffs, and they hold regular camps and travel widely. Brazil, another World Cup contender and next year’s Olympic host in Rio de Janeiro, established an 18-month residency camp for its women’s team this year.
But Ivory Coast had played only once in the eight months before its thumping by the Germans on Sunday. When Cameroon opened World Cup play against Ecuador on Monday, it will be only its fourth match this year. Ecuador will be playing its fifth.
Coach Tony Readings of New Zealand often has a different problem with preparation: Sometimes he has trouble merely keeping up with his own players. New Zealand’s women are scattered among teams around the world, and while the Ferns’ budget has increased as it enters its third straight World Cup, Readings still has to make tough choices about how to spend every dollar.
“That is an issue,” he said. “So we get players to send footage, and we obviously keep an eye on their results. We’d love to go over and see them play more, but you just have to decide what the priority is.”
Readings said the women’s soccer powers benefit from having established leagues that keep many of the their players nearby, and thus available to their national team coaches at any time.
“A lot of our players are based a long way away,” Readings said before New Zealand played the United States in April, “so we can’t have a camp for a week like the U.S.”
Because New Zealand’s qualifying schedule is so short — Oceania decides its qualifier in a single tournament over about a week — Readings has focused recently on scheduling friendlies against better opposition. Before its opener against the Netherlands on Saturday, New Zealand had already played games at Denmark, the United States and Spain. It picked up another friendly at Japan on its way the tournament.
“Not many teams want to travel to New Zealand,” Readings said. “Normally, it’s us that travels overseas.”
That can get expensive, making larger tournaments such as the annual Algarve Cup and the Cyprus Cup valuable scouting combines. The United States is a regular at the Algarve, an annual event on the south coast of Portugal that in a good year puts together a field to rival the World Cup.
The United States beat three World Cup qualifiers — Norway, Switzerland and France — en route to this year’s Algarve title in March. That same week, six other World Cup teams met at the Cyprus Cup, where England beat Canada in the final.
The world is getting smaller, too. Canada coach John Herdman, who was Readings’
A lot of our players are based a long way away, so we can’t have a camp for a week like the U.S.
predecessor in New Zealand, said that teams now connect with the performance analysts of rival teams to share video.
For instance, he s ai d, China would have video of Thailand from Asian qualifiers. So if he needed it, he said, he could call China and say, can we have all of Thailand’s footage? “And they’ ll say, ‘Yeah, yeah, no problem; can we have all the United States footage?’ ” he said. “‘Yeah, yeah, no problem.’ ”
African teams remain more of a mystery. Nigeria, the continental champion, has played only two friendlies in the past seven months. Yet, the Nigerians were able to stun Sweden with three second-half goals to grab a 3-3 draw on Monday in Winnipeg.
Ivory Coast qualified for the World Cup last October, then didn’t play an official match until May, when it lost an exhibition against Cameroon in Abidjan.
In the end, Germany didn’t need any scouting help to rout Ivory Coast. But still, Neid said, “We prefer to see them with our own eyes.”