this is one of those times where i’m genuinely proud to be an american. i’m bad with doing things when i am supposed to, but i’m going to try to be better. an especially simpler process since there aren’t any world cup games that interest me until next tuesday.
a little background: i have been obsessed with women’s soccer, ever since i watched the 1999 women’s world cup final on espn classic when i was a freshman in high school. it never hurt that all the girls i kept falling in love with were soccer players. i played soccer a little bit in high school…but as it turns out, it’s better for me to keep that as a spectator sport.
as a matter of fact, UM’s team has the first home game tonight. i’ll be there, with my obnoxious camera that i would like to at some point write a review of. and yes, i know, i’m not supposed to end a sentence with a prepostion. whatever.
but yeah, about two weeks ago, i just happened to be moseying around on the nike women’s site, and noticed the new ad campaign for the women’s national team, “the best team you’ve never heard of.” i hadn’t been paying attention to women’s soccer (gasp!) for some time, so i went to the site. and spent the next hour and a half getting acquainted with the new and slightly revamped USWNT. so i’ve basically being getting up at the crack of dawn this week to watch the live games on espn (2).
i had several minor heart attacks while watching the battle between the us and north korea on tuesday. something interesting that i noticed was that each offensive attack encompassed all their strikers and all their midfielders, a reigning mass of tiny korean women with the exact same haircut. they attacked in a block…something i dubbed the typical communist attack. oh, kim jong-il. it’s so hard to take a man seriously when he has been protrayed in a movie with puppets.
then today…i watched us whoop up on sweden, a game that i anticipated to be a bit trickier for us. however, some key factors helped us achieve a much needed victory. first of all, hope solo. i thought this, and apparently so did the announcers: it was utterly vital for hope solo and the back three to keep out attacking goals. we needed the three points from this game, and thank God for solo’s composure and placement. a couple of times she seemed to get lucky, but she seemed much more in control of things than against the pressure-happy north koreans. even though the swedes got a couple shots on goal, her punch-out of the particularly menacing attempt in the middle of the second half, and her subsequent imperturbability proved her mettle as a player. her size and former field experience are not the only characteristics that make her appealing to her coach as a starter and frightening to opponents. secondly, and of no lesser importance to the usa’s success, are the legs and head of star striker and international phenom abby wambach. the woman is basically made of steel. she’s is a footballer robot, perfect execution. even on a less than stellar PK in the first half, wambach is about results. and lord knows she delivered what some might call a do-over, with a quick chest bump and pelting into the upper left corner just beyond the outstretched hands of the swedish keeper. this is another player whose size and strength is fantastic and works for the team, especially when playing with smaller and slighter teams like north korea and upcoming nigeria. i would say the only other thing that needed to go right for us came about as the result of the inexperience and frequent missteps of the second tier keeper sweden was forced to go with for this match, lindahl. i was disappointed, because my favorite player, natasha kai, did not make an appearance. with her inexperience on the international stage and in world cup play, i would have expected greg ryan, the head coach of the us team, to put her in an earlier match, where her near-deadly speed might have been an asset and to at least get a feel for what is to come in the forthcoming weeks. maybe we’ll get a glimpse of the hawai’i native in the match against nigeria.
anyways, i just wanted to post about one of the things i’m obsessed with. back to normality in a few…
