The National Team

by Caitlin Murray

  When they noticed the Brazilians trying to catch their breath and relax before the start of 30-minute overtime, the Americans knew they had a mental edge.

  “For me, that was an emotional up-lifter,” Abby Wambach said. “I thought, Even with 10 men, we’re still fitter, we’re still stronger.”

  But it didn’t take long for Marta to again do Marta-esque things. Just two minutes into extra time, she scored again. In a splendid flash of individual brilliance, she flicked a ball behind her off the far post and into the net. The Brazilians now led, 2–1. Unless the Americans could fire back, Brazil would win as soon as the whistle blew.

  The Americans had their chances. Alex Morgan had a shot deflected away. Carli Lloyd fired a shot over the bar. But they weren’t finding their equalizer, and the clock ticked past the 120 minutes that marked the end of extra time.

  It looked like the Americans were going to suffer their earliest exit ever in a major tournament. The referee’s decisions, Marta’s skills, the soccer gods—everything was just conspiring against the Americans.

  The clock ticked ahead into the 122nd minute—the match was now into the stoppage time of extra time, and the whistle would blow any second. Cristiane dribbled the ball into the corner, trying to waste precious seconds off the clock. When Christie Pearce contested for the ball, Cristiane went down like she had been zapped by an electric shock—a dive in a cynical attempt to stop play, which the referee ignored.

  Carli Lloyd collected the ball and took a few touches in the USA’s half, muscling off a Brazilian player before spraying the ball out wide to Megan Rapinoe. The clock kept ticking.

  “I was like, What are you doing?” Wambach later recalled thinking. “Why are you passing it wide? In my mind I was like, Just kick it straight direct north towards the goal as possible because that’s where I am.”

  Rapinoe, running into Brazil’s half, took a touch to settle the ball, looked up at the back post where Wambach was waving her arm, and then launched the ball off her left foot. Or as Rapinoe would later tell reporters: “I just took a touch and friggin’ smacked it.”

  The ball sailed through the air—it must’ve gone 50 yards—and as it dangled in the air, moving toward the box, it lingered just long enough to build a gasp of anticipation. Americans who were hunched around their TVs had enough time to clutch hands or hold their breath.

  For Wambach, who was ready at the back post, her eye never left the ball as it dropped toward her. She was waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting.

  The anticipation must’ve gotten to Brazilian goalkeeper Andréia, who erroneously thought she had enough time to come off her line and punch the ball away. Instead, Wambach planted her feet and jumped straight up into the air, thrusting her head toward the ball. She beat Andréia to the ball and snapped it toward the goal. Wambach’s eyes were closed, but the sound of the ball rattling the back of the net was unmistakable. Goal, USA. The score: 2–2.

  “OH, CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!” ESPN announcer Ian Darke shouted at the top of his lungs to American viewers through their TV sets. “ABBY WAMBACH HAS SAVED THE USA’S LIFE IN THIS WORLD CUP!”

  Wambach ran over to the corner flag and slid, releasing a primal scream. The players closest to her—Tobin Heath and Alex Morgan—hugged her first. Kelley O’Hara leapt off the bench and raced over to Wambach, and everyone else soon followed. Rapinoe fist-pumped furiously and pounded on her chest.

  It was perhaps the most exhilarating moment in the national team’s history—perhaps it could rival the 1999 World Cup win, which had fittingly happened exactly 12 years earlier. Either way, coming after 121 minutes and 19 seconds, it was the latest goal in World Cup history—men’s or women’s—and it was a thrilling boost for the Americans. There was no way they were going to lose to Brazil on penalty kicks now.

  “No doubt whatsoever,” Rapinoe said.

  In the shootout that followed, Hope Solo saved one of Brazil’s penalty kicks, while the Americans buried all theirs. The Americans were advancing to the semifinal.

  The stunning last-second goal—Rapinoe’s cross and Wambach’s header—would captivate the nation back home. Suddenly a country that hadn’t been particularly attuned to this Women’s World Cup fell back in love with its national team. A team that had fallen off the radar since 2005 was thrust back into the spotlight again.

  If Abby Wambach worried in 2008 about the team not needing her, she proved her fears wrong at the perfect time.

  “The power of that goal is amazing,” Wambach later said. “People tell me all the time how they remember where they were when that happened. It’s cool that I was a part of it, but I think it’s more cool to kind of look at it from an evolutionary aspect, to see where the game was and where the game has gone. That’s kind of the pivotal turning point . . . We really felt there was a huge shift in the popularity of women’s soccer in 2011.”

  To this day, Wambach’s goal is widely considered one of the best and most important goals in American soccer history. It felt like a miracle, but it was actually by design. It was the result of relentless training every day and a team culture that demanded preparation.

  “What sticks for me with that goal is that we trained that,” Heather O’Reilly says. “It wasn’t something that was just lucky. Certainly, we didn’t plan that exact play, but with Pia, when we played in a conventional 4–4–2 with Abby up top, we worked on crosses so much. Pretty much every training session was changing the point of attack and putting lethal crosses in the box.”

  “Training pays off and hard work pays off and repetition pays off,” O’Reilly adds. “When you do those things with purpose year-in and year-out, then when these big moments come, people think it’s so incredible and such a miracle, but in reality, it was just practice and, in the biggest moment, being able to execute.”

  At the same time, the performance said something else about what the Americans had—something that couldn’t come simply from training. The national team never gave up, even in the face of what seemed liked insurmountable odds. They kept their heads in the match and believed they could win, even with their backs against the wall, down to the very last possession.

  That never-say-die mentality, Sundhage says, was something she found in the American players when she took over as the USA coach. She certainly didn’t teach it to them.

  “In Sweden, we talk about attacking, defending, positioning, this and that,” Sundhage says. “I think we are fairly smart when it comes to tactics. But here, the Americans have another component: They just go for it.”

  Marta was once asked by a reporter why the Americans were so hard to beat. She pointed to her head, and the reporter thought she was saying they had a strong aerial presence. “No, no,” Marta interjected. “It’s the mentality.”

  * * *

  After that dramatic thriller versus Brazil, the Americans had still only advanced to the semifinal. They had two more games to play if they wanted to be World Cup champions, and recovering from an emotional roller coaster like they just experienced wasn’t easy.

  “It’s been such an emotional experience that talking about it has helped,” Abby Wambach said the next day. “When you talk through some of these crazy emotional things, it allows you to not only feel them, but to have experienced them and be able to put them somewhere you can hold them for a while so you can move on.”

  When the semifinal versus France arrived, the Americans approached it with the same dogged determination as the previous match.

  In truth, France outplayed the USA at times. They knocked the ball around and held on to possession, which frustrated the Americans. But the Americans looked determined and well-organized as a unit. With an early goal from Lauren Cheney, a game-winner from Abby Wambach, and an insurance goal from Alex Morgan, the U.S. beat France, 3–1.

  With that, the national team was set to appear in its first World Cup final since they won in 1999. Their opponent? Japan, a team that had never beaten the U.S. in 25 prior meetings.

  Ther
e was a bigger sense of purpose for the Japanese team, though. Before they’d embarked on their 2011 World Cup campaign, they’d left a country in devastation. Just 75 days before the tournament started, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami that killed around 16,000 people and obliterated the country’s infrastructure, causing damage worth $360 billion.

  The people of Japan rallied around the team’s run through the tournament, finding joy and respite from the tragedy at home. For the players, there was a belief that they weren’t just competing for themselves. Indeed, the Japanese weren’t considered favorites coming into the tournament. Even as they got through to the final, they didn’t do it in dominating fashion. But something propelled them forward.

  “Every game we won was something of a surprise for us,” Japanese forward Mana Iwabuchi later said. “We didn’t expect success after success. Beating Germany in the quarterfinals was something very special. That is when we realized that we were actually pretty good.”

  The Americans were used to being the favorite in major tournaments. If anything, they seemed to relish the chance to prove how good they were. Now, they had to do it against an opponent that was the clear easy-to-root-for underdog.

  On July 17, 2011, the Americans walked onto the field at Waldstadion in Frankfurt. They were finally back in a World Cup final for the first time in 12 years.

  The Americans started strong and dominant, creating dangerous chance after dangerous chance. Lauren Cheney tapped a onetime shot inches wide. Then Abby Wambach smashed a rocket off the crossbar. Later, an Alex Morgan shot went off the post. After that, a Wambach header was tipped just over the bar. Nothing was going in, and the frustration of the Americans was palpable.

  Finally, in the 69th minute, the USA broke through. Rapinoe ran onto a ball poked away from a Japanese player, saw Morgan racing up the field, and launched a pass. Morgan took a touch with her right foot to set the ball in front of her favored left and smashed it into the back of the net.

  But a defensive mistake 12 minutes later would erase the USA’s lead. A Christie Pearce pass up the field was cut out, and Japan moved into counterattack mode. Yūki Nagasato crossed the ball into the box and Rachel Buehler stopped it, but when she went to clear it out, she cleared it past the face of the goal. Aya Miyama was right there for an easy tap-in. It was 1–1 with the 90 minutes nearly over—the match would have to stretch into extra time.

  With another 30 minutes added to the clock, the Americans continued to battle. In the 104th minute, it was Alex Morgan, the youngster, yet again. This time, she picked out Abby Wambach in the middle of the box and crossed a pinpoint ball to Wambach’s head. All Wambach had to do was tip her forehead down and let the ball knock into the back of the net. The Americans were up now, 2–1, and victory felt close.

  It wasn’t close enough, though. Ten minutes later, Japan came roaring back. This time it was a corner kick. Aya Miyama launched the ball toward the near post, and Homare Sawa, the team’s captain, faced the sideline but stuck her foot out. With the outside of her foot, her body not even facing the goal, she flicked the ball past Hope Solo. Her finish was as unexpected as it was crafty.

  Japan had equalized and, once time ran out, the Americans again had to win a back-and-forth thriller on penalty kicks.

  Shannon Boxx took the first kick, firing to the right. Goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori guessed correctly but lunged well ahead of the ball—she would never be able to get a hand on it. Instead, she kicked her trailing leg out and blocked the ball.

  “No matter what, I’ll always question whether I should have gone the other way when I hit that PK against Japan,” Boxx says now. “That will never go away. When I start to think about it, it upsets me again.”

  Next was Aya Miyama, who calmly fired past Hope Solo. It was then Carli Lloyd’s turn. She ran up to the ball like she was sprinting through the last steps of a 100-meter dash, and her shot sailed over the bar.

  The World Cup trophy was slipping away. But Solo blocked Yūki Nagasato’s shot, giving the U.S. a lifeline, if only Tobin Heath could bury her chance. She placed the ball down, and her body language showed some obvious nerves. On the run up, Heath’s body position gave away that she was shooting to her left, and Kaihori dived that way to make the save.

  The Americans had missed three straight penalty kicks. It didn’t matter that Abby Wambach was next in the rotation and that she scored. When Saki Kumagai, Japan’s fourth kicker, buried her shot, it was over. Japan had won the 2011 World Cup.

  The Americans walked away crestfallen as the Japanese players jumped into a dogpile of celebration. Once the Japanese players recovered from the celebrations, they unfurled a sign that read: “To our friends around the world—thank you for your support.”

  “Who knows—maybe it was fate,” Boxx says now. “Maybe they needed that more than we did at that time. Maybe I say that to make myself feel better. But I think it really was good for their country to take that home and have some happiness.”

  The U.S. team’s equipment manager had covered the players’ belongings in plastic wrap so celebratory champagne wouldn’t get all over their stuff in the locker room. But when the U.S. lost in penalty kicks, he had gotten only partially through removing it by the time the players returned.

  “I remember going into the locker room and we were so upset. We saw the plastic laying around, kind of half on our stuff,” Heather O’Reilly says with a laugh. “That was really tough.”

  Pia Sundhage, the coach who was normally so effervescent, became stoic. Normally, she’d offer up some sort of speech to the players after a game, but she had nothing to say. When the team went back to the hotel ballroom U.S. Soccer had rented out for the players and their loved ones, Sundhage didn’t stick around for long.

  “Afterward, I wasn’t able to enjoy that moment after the final,” Sundhage says now. “I’m a little bit ashamed of that because I should’ve been very happy because of the way we played. That was a lesson to learn.”

  The Americans had played their best, most complete game of the 2011 World Cup. They had looked dominant, and they were better than Japan. But they lost.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Okay, This Is Our Payback”

  When the national team returned to the U.S. from losing the 2011 Women’s World Cup, they returned as, well, losers—at least in the most literal sense of the word. The players had just lost the World Cup, and they were disconsolate about it.

  But when they arrived in New York City and stepped off the team bus into Times Square, they were shocked by what they saw. A throng of people was cheering for them as if they were the world champions. For the players, who were still devastated, the heroes’ welcome had a strange dissonance.

  “The streets of Times Square were just absolutely packed,” says Heather O’Reilly. “It was a very bizarre feeling—it was this atmosphere as if we won, but we didn’t. We were being celebrated, but nothing less than winning was acceptable to us. It was an interesting thing for us to cope with.”

  The American public, it seemed, had been reminded of the national team’s existence and wanted to talk to the players. In New York, they did the media rounds, appearing on the Today show, Good Morning America, The Daily Show, CNN, and Late Show with David Letterman, among others. Fans wanted to shake the players’ hands and take pictures with them.

  “We’d be walking down the street and hear people screaming Great job! and we’d look at each other like, But we didn’t win,” Shannon Boxx says. “It was really weird.”

  Even in defeat, the 2011 World Cup final was huge for the national team’s popularity. It was watched on ESPN by 13.5 million Americans, a soccer record for the channel. Getting people to watch was one thing, but the national team won over the hearts of Americans with their attacking style of play and their gutsy, relentless never-say-die mentality. The final lit social media abuzz and set a new record on Twitter for the number of tweets per second.

  Other th
an Christie Pearce, who was on the 1999 World Cup team as a depth piece, none of the players had experienced anything like what they saw when they returned from Germany. The team surged back into the American mainstream practically overnight. Hope Solo, a breakout star, appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and was asked to compete on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Everyone on the team was more famous than they had ever been.

  At one point in New York City as the players looked out from their bus onto the crowd of fans who had gathered to catch a glimpse of the team, a scream came from Abby Wambach.

  “Fuck!” she shouted. Those around her—startled and worried that something bad had just happened—turned to her and asked her what was wrong.

  Wambach, with resignation in her voice, responded: “We didn’t win.”

  It hit Wambach like a ton of bricks. She saw the response the team had gotten—a massive surge of fan support—and she saw the missed opportunity. If the national team had actually won the World Cup, how much bigger could it have been for the sport?

  The 2012 London Olympics were around the corner, and the national team had a chance to keep the momentum going. If they could play well and win gold, maybe they could even build off of what they started in Germany.

  They would have to qualify for the Olympics first, though. With the memory of losing to Mexico in the 2011 World Cup qualifiers still fresh, they knew this tournament needed to be treated like it was its own Olympic Games.

  * * *

  Alex Morgan had enjoyed a very good World Cup as a super sub. She scored two goals, one of them in the final, and looked suited for the highest level of the international game.

  Fans of the national team saw it too and were clamoring for more of the youngster on the field. With her distinctive pink headband that kept her ponytail in place, it was hard to miss the Los Angeles–area native as she galloped toward goal. She earned a nickname, Baby Horse, and started being covered in the media as the next big thing.