by Alex Morgan
Nineteen minutes in, I think we were all ready for some action. Canadian player Melissa Tancredi took the ball down the field toward our goal. Megan tried to fend her off with her left arm, and sure enough, Tancredi went down. The Canadians were going to get a free kick. It was a long kick, and we were just too much of a swarm. We quickly shot the ball back toward the sideline. Things were getting a little heated, and as one announcer said, the Canadian team had stopped “easing into the match.” They were all in.
Sure enough, the aggressiveness they’d shown in the first minute of play returned about twenty-one minutes in. They took the ball down the field toward Hope, and after a short pass, Melissa Tancredi tapped the ball over to Christine Sinclair, who kicked it right in. It was an easy goal for them, and it was the best play of the game so far. We’d been so feisty and played so hard for the bulk of the half, and yet Canada had struck first. It stung.
I didn’t know it then, but with that goal, Christine Sinclair marked her 141st national goal, only one behind Abby’s record.
About a half hour into the game, Abby collided with Melissa Tancredi, and we got a free kick. It sailed long and high . . . and right at me. Now, headers are not my strong suit. That’s Abby all the way. She’s the one with three Twitter fan accounts devoted just to her head (seriously, check them out at @WambachHead, @WambachsHead and @AbbyWambachHead) and a Facebook fan page where her head is always making fun of her feet. Pia is always saying that headers are my weakness, so when I jumped in the air, made contact, and the ball glanced just to the left of the goal, I guess I wasn’t surprised.
When the halftime whistle blew at forty-five minutes, Canada was still up 1–0. We’d made some great plays, but we hadn’t scored, even though we’d had the ball 55 percent of the time. Canada had taken two shots, and one had gone in.
But we’d be back. We were going to win this game. Just like when my sisters used to think there was no way I could beat them at Monopoly or cards, I always knew I could and I would. We were just waiting for the right moment.
Stay Confident
Confidence is so important as you try to reach your goals. Try to never doubt yourself—it doesn’t do you any good. When we went into the locker room during halftime, we were down, but we weren’t going to let it get us down. We were pumped—there were still at least forty-five minutes to even things out. Remain confident even when you’re not ahead. Don’t worry. You’ll get there!
CHAPTER 41
* * *
We went back to the field more eager to win than ever, and pretty soon the game got physical. At one point Abby was knocked to the ground in a chase after the ball, and the other player’s cleats dug into her right leg. (If you’ve never had studs scrape into your leg at high speed, consider yourself lucky.) Then about a minute later, Abby jumped for the ball in the box, and she got sandwiched between two Canadian players. She was really taking a beating!
And then in the fifty-fourth minute the craziest thing happened. Megan Rapinoe was taking a corner kick, and we were all cramped around the box, the Canadians ready to hustle the ball away from the goal and us determined to get it in. Megan kicked hard. The ball sailed through the air, fast, just over one Canadian player’s head, and after a slight arch, it landed perfectly right inside in the near corner of the goal. I saw a pile of white Canadian jerseys fall into the goal after it, and I instantly knew what had happened. GOAL!
Initially we couldn’t figure out exactly how the ball had gone in. Had the Canadian goalie’s knee glanced it? Had Christine Sinclair mistakenly knocked it in? No. It was that rare, awe-inspiring thing called the Olympic goal. That’s a point scored off a corner kick in which no one touches it—the ball just sails in. It could be caused by the wind, a great spin on the ball, or just dumb luck, but it’s a beautiful thing.
As Megan jumped into my arms and hugged me tight, I didn’t think I’d ever been so happy. We were back in the game, tied 1–1.
For the next ten minutes, though, the chants of “Let’s Go Canada” sounded a little louder than they had earlier in the game. When you stop being the underdog, sometimes people stop rooting for you. Don’t let that stop you! The will to win is inside yourself—it doesn’t come from outside. Canada must have been motivated by the cheers, though, because as the sixty-sixth minute ticked by, they got aggressive. Tancredi made a perfect cross from the left side of the field, into our box, and right to the head of Christine Sinclair. She knocked the ball in, just like that. And with that header—Abby’s signature move—she tied my dear friend’s international goal record. Canada went up 2–1.
We shot back quickly. We had to. As one announcer said, when we’re in a mood, nothing can stop us. We were so fired up as we took the ball down the field in the sixty-ninth minute of play, and when a long pass landed right at Megan’s feet, she belted the ball from seventy feet. That’s a long kick, but that’s one of the things Megan’s best at! It was amazing—the ball ripped through the air, hit the goalpost, and went right in. Megan scored again! We were now tied 2–2.
Throughout the years I’ve learned never to lose my competitive edge. I’m the most competitive person I know, and it always pushes me a little further. So I remember thinking we had to go into overdrive after Megan’s goal. A tie was good, but we had to get ahead. Apparently Canada felt the same, though, because just a few minutes later Christine Sinclair scored another goal for Canada, heading the ball into the goal off a corner kick. There was nothing Hope could have done to stop it. It was now 3–2 Canada, and Christine Sinclair had overtaken Abby’s international scoring record and gained ground on Mia Hamm’s record. And we were still behind, with elimination from the Olympics on the line.
We couldn’t lose. We just couldn’t. We had to either play harder and better or catch a break. And as the seventy-eighth minute of play began, the latter happened.
I think one of the hardest jobs in the world is being a soccer referee. They’re all alone on the field, running three to five miles each game. They have to be in the best shape of their life, maybe even better than the players. I can get a sub—the referee can’t. And every single call on the field is up to them.
The referee in our game, Christiana Pedersen, took a lot of heat for what happened in the seventy-eighth minute. Megan had just taken a corner kick that the Canadian goalie, Erin McLeod, had caught. There’s a rule in soccer called the six-second penalty, which means that the goalie can’t hold on to the ball for more than six seconds before kicking it away. This call is rarely enforced—most refs take it for granted that the goalie wants to get the ball back into play, so they just let the rule slide. But that doesn’t mean that the players aren’t paying attention. Abby was near Christiana Pedersen, counting the seconds tick by. In fact, she’d been counting all game since the Canadian keeper was taking at least twelve seconds every time she had the ball. Five . . . six . . . seven . . . until Abby hit ten. This time, Pedersen blew the whistle.
Megan got to take a penalty kick from the spot of the violation—way inside the penalty area. The Canadians were lined up like soldiers, six white jerseys right in a line when Megan kicked—and the ball hit two Canadians right in the hands and arms. Although players instinctively try to protect themselves when a ball is coming toward them, if your arm isn’t in a natural position when the ball hits you, it’s considered a handball. That’s what Pedersen saw, and she called the violation. Boy, did that anger the Canadian coach and players. They didn’t believe it was a handball.
So it was Abby against McLeod, and the decks were stacked against McLeod. Not only was she reeling from two sudden, controversial calls, but she was about to face one of the world’s most successful close-range kickers, and she had to do it alone.
Abby paused. She shot, and she nailed it, BOOM, right into the goal.
We were tied 3–3 with just over ten minutes left in regulation. But ten minutes can be a lifetime in a soccer game.
Life Can
Be Unfair
In any kind of competition, or in the pursuit of any kind of goal, things may happen that you consider flat-out wrong. A teacher may give you an undeserved C on a paper, or a controversial call in a game might happen. But you have to push ahead. If the Canadians had pitched a fit about the handball call, it would have disrupted things even further, and players might have been ejected from the game. But instead they simply filed complaints with the Olympic committee, which was the appropriate course of action. Don’t dwell on why unfair things happen because you can’t change the past—just try your best to deal with it calmly.
CHAPTER 42
* * *
At the end of regulation we were still tied 3–3. We’d had one chance to get a goal: I’d taken the ball down the field against one defender and passed it to Abby, but she kicked it just wide. When she fell to the ground and slapped her hands against her head, I knew she was frustrated. So was I.
The rules in the Olympics are much like other tournaments—if you’re tied after ninety minutes, you have two periods of extra time, each fifteen minutes long. Hopefully someone will have won by the end of those, but if they haven’t, you go into a penalty shoot-out. And believe it or not, there has never, ever been a shoot-out in Olympic women’s soccer.
Extra time started, and we were off to the races. Both teams were playing hard and playing fast, and I could see all my teammates breathing heavily as we ran up and back down the field. Sydney Leroux took a shot early on, and later Abby almost got one in off her world-famous head, but it wasn’t to be.
I had been playing hard for almost two hours when the first period of extra time came to a close. We were all exhausted. It had been 105 minutes, and we were playing one of the most high-pressure games of our lives! When we stood in the huddle, awaiting the beginning of the final fifteen minutes of play, Abby, not Pia, was the one doing all the talking. We never get much time between breaks in play, so she spoke fast.
“Everybody needs to believe in each other right now. And keep it together. Believe we’re going to win. We’re going to do it if we play as a team. We can do this!”
Abby is always so motivating, especially at critical moments. And here she was, psyching us up in a way she never had before.
When we started again, it was like unarmed combat, as one announcer said. Players were going down left and right and staying down much longer than they would have at the beginning of the game. That’s what happens when you’ve played for that long: Everything just hurts worse. You cramp up, old injuries come back to haunt you, and if you haven’t had enough water, your sides will start splitting. I was knocked down right outside the Canadian goal line at about the 113th minute—Abby thought it was a penalty, but sadly, it wasn’t—and I had to lie there just to catch my breath. Get up, Alex. . . . Get up and win this game once and for all.
About 117 minutes in, the Canadians were desperately defending against two plays that could have been shots on goal. And then, with two minutes before the end of extra time, I made a beautiful pass right to Abby, who was waiting in the penalty box. She jumped, the ball sailed perfectly off the side of her head . . . and it soared into the air, touching the tips of the Canadian goalkeeper’s fingers and bouncing off the top bar of the goal without going in. Another missed goal. Another chance to end the game lost.
Even though we were still tied, I could just feel that the game was all ours. We’d been at the goal twice as much as Canada, and we’d taken several amazing shots in just a few minutes. At 120 minutes they added three minutes of stoppage time, and I remember feeling my best.
Now, I didn’t know this at the time, but everybody was already talking about what it was going to be like when regulation time ended and we had to take penalty kicks. They just expected that the end of this game would be exactly like the World Cup final against Japan. But I was determined it wouldn’t be.
And sure enough, with forty-five seconds left in the game—forty-five seconds before the first penalty shoot-out in Olympic women’s history—Heather O’Reilly ran harder than I’ve ever seen her run toward a ball that was about to go out of bounds to the right of the Canadian goal. She caught it and kicked it hard, crossing it perfectly toward the goal. And there I was, standing in a swarm of white jerseys. I told myself, C’mon, Alex. All you have to do is get your head on the ball. Connect. I jumped and felt the ball against my head, the part of my body that had been such a disappointment to me in so many games.
And then I heard a roar from the crowd that rivaled any cheering I’d ever heard. It was as if every person in the Theatre of Dreams had stood up, on cue, and screamed at the top of their lungs. And I knew it. The ball had gone in. I’d done it. We’d won the game.
As my teammates hugged me, I noticed tears welling up in my eyes. “I love you,” I heard Abby say to me. “I think I’m in love with you in this moment because you just sent us to the gold-medal game.” The tears burst from my eyes.
We still had a few seconds left to play, so we finished out the game, and then I let myself relax. I cried on the field—who does that?—but it felt good. I knew my parents were up there crying too, and I knew they were proud.
We were going to the finals.
Know Your Weaknesses
Your weaknesses may not always let you down. You may be terrible at math and feel incredibly nervous before a geometry test, but you just might surprise yourself and get a good grade. Somehow you just knew the answers, or you worked out how to figure them out. Look at my headers—I’d never done them well. But I practiced, and a header took us into the gold-medal Olympic game. Know your weaknesses and work at them despite your fear.
CHAPTER 43
* * *
It had been one year and twenty-three days since Japan had beaten us in the World Cup. And every single one of those days had filled me with a drive to win unlike any I’d felt before.
Three days after the semifinal win, it was hard not to still feel happy. Some people had called my match-winning goal “Morgan’s Miracle,” but I knew it was no miracle—that moment was what I’d been training for my whole life. And it had all brought me here, to Wembley Stadium, the second-largest stadium in all of Europe and the most expensive stadium in the world. As we walked onto the field in front of eighty thousand people, the noise was deafening. Just a few years before, a women’s soccer team wouldn’t have been able to fill a stadium that large, but we’d proven ourselves year after year, and the crowds had responded. Now here we were about to face an epic rematch against Japan, and both teams were determined to win. We wanted to taste victory, and Japan wanted to show the world that their first Olympic final appearance was no fluke.
When the starting whistle blew, we acted fast, and I was all over the field within minutes. Three minutes in I took a shot on the goal, but it landed squarely in the goalie’s hands. Next time!
And next time came less than five minutes later. We were all crowded close to the Japanese penalty box after a breathless run toward the goal. Tobin kicked the ball over from the left side of the field, and then I turned it around, cutting it back toward Abby, who was waiting near the goal box. But Carli Lloyd was on her way toward it, too, and she just nodded it right into the goal, like there was some sort of invisible force coming right out of her head into the ball. The ball sailed right into the net like it was shot out of a gun.
I could tell how frustrated the Japanese players were. They were already at a disadvantage in terms of their size. We’re a tall bunch of girls. Abby is five-eleven, and I’m pretty tall at five-eight. But one of their players is five feet and one half inch. Her head barely comes up to Abby’s neck! So when the Japanese players began advancing toward us about seventeen minutes in, I knew it was because of their technical genius—they were disciplined and liked to press hard. They took some frightening shots on goal, and a kick by their forward Yūki Ōgimi made Hope jump so high in the air that when she fell, it looked like a tree ge
tting blown over and landing with a thud on the ground.
I imagine they grew even more frustrated when one of their players almost headed the ball into her own goal at around twenty-seven minutes. We had just taken a long shot from way outside the penalty area—there’s almost no chance it could have gone in—but one of their defenders hit it the wrong way, and lucky for her the goalpost deflected it. I was right there and saw it all unfold. If it had gone in, it would have been humiliating. Especially in the Olympic final!
As the waning seconds of the first half came and went, we were up 1–0. We marched into the locker room excited but nervous. This game was so close, and we needed to double our efforts to secure a victory.
I don’t think any of us headed into the second half thinking we were guaranteed a win. We knew how strong Japan could be, but most of all, we remembered last year. The sting of the World Cup loss was still all too real. Even though the US women’s team had won Olympic gold four years ago at Beijing, this game felt like the most important of our lives. And, of course, this was my first Olympic final. I’d only gotten to watch the Beijing games on TV!
When the whistle blew, the Japanese came on strong, knocking Hope to the ground after an aggressive shot right at the goal line. But pretty quickly after that, the game was ours again. I was a lot fiercer this half—I had the ball more, and I took it down the field confidently. I was starting to feel good. . . . Maybe we really would take home the gold.
At about fifty-three minutes in, that possibility became even more likely. Megan secured the ball and passed it to Carli Lloyd well back into the midfield. Carli dribbled it toward the Japanese goal all on her own, and I could see her getting closer and closer to the penalty box. I was far to her left, wide open, and Abby was to her right. Would she pass it to one of us?