GAME 2 FEELS FAMILIAR
TOKYO — Gather round, children, and hear the story of a soccer team that lost its opening match and went on to win a gold medal.
It happened in 2008. And it could happen again.
That’s the message that the U.S. women’s national team sent loud and clear Saturday, rebounding from their lackluster loss to Sweden with a 6-1 dismantling of New Zealand in Saitama, Japan.
With the win, the Americans are now in second place in their group based on goal differential. Their final game of group play is Tuesday against Australia.
“We should be ruthless,” said Carli Lloyd. “It’s a switch that should never be turned off. … Grit, heart, fight.”
Lloyd is the only member of this team who was part of that 2008 squad that lost its opening game to Norway and then rebounded to win its next two games (including a thrashing of New Zealand). That team eventually won the gold medal, beating Brazil when a 26-year-old Lloyd scored the game’s only goal in extra time.
Lloyd is 39 now, part of a world championship team that has far more resources to draw on than that 2008 group, which was coming off a fractured, disastrous 2007 World Cup.
The average age of the team that Vlatko Andonovski fielded on Saturday was 36, with both Lloyd and Megan Rapinoe, 36, getting the start over Alex Morgan and Christen Press.
But it was young dynamo Rose Lavelle, 26, who allowed the team to finally take a deep breath with a gorgeous goal in the ninth minute, popping the cork on the team’s Olympic scoring. The team had a 2-0 lead at half, and after first lady Jill Biden arrived for the second half, the team pulled away with four more goals — which included two own goals for New Zealand.
The lopsided result is sure to relax a team that looked flat and baffled during a 3-0 loss to Sweden.
“We didn’t go, in two days, from being a really great team to not being a good team,” said Crystal Dunn. “We are well equipped to deal with adversity.”
We’ll see. This team hasn’t had to deal with much adversity for awhile. It had a 44-game winning streak going before Sweden’s body blow, the first loss under Andonovski. And adversity has consequences in this program.
All one had to do to remember that was look to the other sideline and see New Zealand’s coach Tom Sermanni. Sermanni replaced U.S. coach Pia Sundhage in 2012, after Sundhage coached the team to a gold medal in London. Things went great in his first year, but early in his second year the team struggled at the Algarve Cup. Fourteen months before the 2015 World Cup, Sermanni was fired, with an 18-4-2 record, and replaced by Jill Ellis, who went on to win two world championships.
There isn’t much room for error on this team that has been so successful and so groundbreaking. On Friday, the U.S. women’s lawyers filed an appeal of a federal judge’s dismissal of the portion of their groundbreaking gender discrimination lawsuit involving equal pay. The timing is based on legal maneuverings, but it is fitting that it comes as the team is trying to win yet another championship. This team’s relevance is both in its accomplishments on the field and its societal impact.
Now the team will look toward Australia, a dangerous team even though it has only one victory over the United States, back in 2017. It also tied the U.S. team in 2018 and gave Sweden all it could handle on Saturday in a 4-2 loss.
The veteran Americans only have two days to rest, and all the older players have notched significant minutes in the first two games in heat and humidity. Stanford star Catarina Macario made her Olympic debut late in the game on Saturday and Andonovski may need to turn to younger players like her on Tuesday.
This story, as Lloyd can tell you, still has a long way to go.