When Nobody Was Watching

by Carli Lloyd

  We press on and the game goes into overtime. Marta scores again with a looping left-footed volley over Hope’s outstretched arm. Outmanned and almost out of time, we desperately push to keep our World Cup alive but are generating few threats. Abby gets the ball in the box but is denied as she turns to shoot. I have a good look from twenty yards out but launch it over the crossbar in the 121st minute. We might get one more chance, if we are lucky. Cristiane gets the ball in the left corner and holds the ball against Christie, dawdling, hoping for the whistle. Christie finally gets a piece of it, and Ali Krieger runs onto the loose ball and sends it to me in the middle. I take three touches up the middle of the field and slide it over to Rapinoe on the left flank. The whistle is going to blow any second.

  Quick, Pinoe, let it fly, I think.

  Pinoe does exactly that, launching a long cross to the far post. Abby is in the neighborhood, tracking it, timing it. She is closely marked. She goes up. Andreia, the Brazilian keeper, bounds off her line and goes up to punch it away. Defender Renata Costa, trying to get a body on Abby, goes up too. Abby gets to the ball first, though, snaps her head forward, and powers the ball into the near corner of the goal.

  As the stadium erupts, Abby runs off to the corner and skids to her knees. It is the latest goal ever scored in the history of the Women’s World Cup. It is about a million-to-one shot to tie the game the way we did, when we did.

  Marta looks as if she has just gotten hit with a plank. Who can blame her? Pia huddles us up, and Paul Rogers chooses who will take the PKs and arranges the order. Paul works with us on PKs almost every day after practice and keeps track of our success rate. I am so ready. I can’t imagine any way we can lose after Abby’s miracle header.

  Boxxy buries the first PK. I step up and do the same, and when Hope makes a stunning stop with an all-out dive to her left, we have the sliver of an opening we need. Ali Krieger finishes it off with a low shot just an inch or two inside the left post, and the party is on. Suddenly a team that was about to pack up and head home and get ripped for another World Cup disappointment has become America’s soccer sweethearts.

  Funny how that goes.

  I am up until all hours and can barely sleep. When we meet the next day, the obvious first task is to put Brazil behind us and get ready for a semifinal against France in Monchengladbach, a city in western Germany, near the Dutch border and the River Rhine. Again we get off to an auspicious start, this time in the ninth minute, when I backheel a ball up the sideline to Heather O’Reilly, who flashes down the flank and fires a cross that Lauren Cheney redirects for a dazzling finish. We don’t sustain any momentum, though, as the French dice us up with their technical skill and quick passing game; they completely dominate the half, even if the scoreboard shows us with the lead.

  The French square the game at one about ten minutes into the second half, which I start, almost inexplicably, with three giveaways in midfield. I haven’t been off the field the whole tournament, but I come off now, Pia subbing me for Pinoe and moving Lauren Cheney into center midfield. I feel awful about this poor patch of play and am distraught that Pia wants me off the field. I feel as though I’ve let everybody down, and some of my old demons fire up like a blowtorch. I start feeling crappy about my whole World Cup. Pinoe is electric and makes things happen right away, leading to another header goal by Abby and an insurance goal by Alex Morgan to seal a 3–1 victory. That’s the most important thing, but even as we celebrate, I am trying to fight off a funk.

  “I really stunk it up tonight,” I tell Brian afterwards.

  Pia tells me to stay positive and think about simplifying things and keeping possession when we play the final against Japan, which beat home team Germany and then Sweden to make it to its first World Cup final.

  “You have to let go of this and start preparing mentally for the final,” James says. “I’m glad this happened now, and glad you got to rest a little because you are going to be fresh and you’re going to play your best game of the tournament when it matters the most.”

  He too talks about keeping it simple, making good decisions, and not trying to produce a highlight-film play with each touch.

  “Just be Carli,” he says. James reminds me of his key points in the usual email he sends before big matches. This final isn’t just big. It’s massive, the most important game of my career.

  At a final run-through before we play Japan, Hege Riise, Pia’s assistant coach, approaches me during stretching.

  “I am so excited for you in this game,” she says. “You always come up big in finals. I know this is going to be your time to shine.”

  “Thanks, Hege. I want nothing more than to shine and bring this World Cup back to the States.”

  I am more nervous than I’ve ever been before a game on July 12, 2011, in Frankfurt, Germany. I have put France behind me, and I’m focusing completely on the next ninety minutes and heeding James’s words.

  Unlike so many other games this year, and in this tournament, we come out flying and make good on Pia’s request to do better with possession. In the first minute Lauren Cheney gets behind the defense and just misses giving us an insanely quick lead. We are buzzing the Japanese goal like hornets, connecting passes, possessing the ball better than we ever have, the ball zipping cleanly from player to player, creating all kinds of chances against a side that normally does this sort of dictating. Abby has a great look but can’t finish it. I get off a couple of dangerous shots but do not convert. Pinoe has a couple of prime chances, and Lauren has another one, but despite our domination, we cannot get on the board in the opening forty-five minutes.

  I’m frustrated that we haven’t broken through but feel so much better about my form and our collective level of play. Japan is about as skillful a team as there is in the world, and for half of a World Cup final its players are pretty much chasing us.

  Keep on pushing. Keep on playing the same way, I tell myself. It will come.

  And at last, in the sixty-ninth minute, it does. I am in a scrum near our 18-yard line, and I poke-check the ball free to Pinoe, who launches a beautiful fifty-yard ball to Alex Morgan, who makes a run straight toward the Japanese goal, her speed springing her free before she slots a leaning, left-footer into the far corner, her second goal in two games. It’s a pretty good way to start a World Cup career for Alex, who is twenty-two and our youngest player.

  The Japanese have had their best World Cup ever, and they’ve done it four months after an earthquake and tsunami devastated the country’s northeast coast, killing almost 20,000 people and leaving thousands more homeless. One of Japan’s professional teams had to cancel its season. All through the tournament, the Japanese coach and players said they hoped they might bring comfort and inspiration to their devastated homeland.

  No, we do not think they are going to go away.

  With under ten minutes to play, Japan takes advantage of a turnover in our end and a misplayed clearance and ties the score. The battle heads into two fifteen-minute extra time periods.

  Pinoe and Alex team up again, and Alex launches a cross that Abby buries with a vintage header, putting us up 2–1, with under five minutes left. But then the Japanese answer again, this time with Homare Sawa, their captain who is playing in her fifth World Cup, who redirects a corner kick with a deft flick of her foot.

  So it comes down to PKs again. Paul Rogers goes over the lineup, and Boxxy steps to the spot first. Ayumi Kaihori, the Japanese keeper, dives left and stops the ball with her foot. The Japanese shooter, Aya Miyama, who scored Japan’s first goal, converts, and now it’s my turn. I stride up to the 18, pick up the ball, and walk purposefully toward the spot, bouncing the ball twice as I go. I place it down and step back. I make my approach. I want to go to the upper left, the same direction as I went against Brazil, but with a little more power. I strike the ball well, but I am leaning back a bit and get under it.

  I am sick almost the moment the ball leaves my foot. The ball skies over the crossbar. I can’t believe it. I ov
erhit it. I was so positive I would bury it. I rub my left hand over my face, turn away from the goal, and walk back to my teammates, never a fun walk to make. People say a few things to pick me up. They mean well, but it doesn’t help much. Japan goes up 2–0, and now Tobin Heath is up. Tobin, who had come on for Pinoe, goes lower left, but Kaihori launches herself to the right and parries it away. We have taken three PKs and missed them all. Abby finally drills one in on her turn, and now it’s on Japanese midfielder Saki Kumagai. If she makes it, Japan wins and we lose. If she misses, we have life.

  Kumagai places the ball down and has to wait for Hope, who is trying to freeze her a bit, standing in her bright yellow uniform a few steps off the line. The referee tells her to get in the goal. Hope stretches her arms horizontally, as if she were a basketball player boxing somebody out, then raises her arms overhead and jumps up and down, trying to occupy every possible inch of space in the goal, trying to look as big and imposing as possible.

  Saki Kumagai rips the ball into the upper left corner. Hope has no chance. The whole Japanese team runs out on the field. The emptiness I feel could fill oceans. If we have to lose, I’m glad it is to Japan, a country that has been through such a horrible ordeal, but that perspective mostly comes later. Now I can’t get much beyond thinking I came up very small for my country. I know it is not just me. I know others missed, and that we win as a team and lose as a team. I just expect way more than this from myself.

  “Don’t worry,” James says. “This is not going to define you. You are just going to keep getting better and better.”

  It is a hard night, a long night. Brian stays with me in the hotel, and it is great having him there. He says and does all the right things. I know how deeply he feels my pain because I see it on his face. I can’t sleep. I keep replaying the PK. Maybe more than anything in my whole soccer career, I want that PK back. My golf pro boyfriend doesn’t need to tell me: there are no mulligans in soccer.

  12

  Wonder in Wembley

  EVEN IN DEFEAT, the U.S. Women’s National Team is bigger than ever. Abby’s epic goal against Brazil seems to have transfixed the whole country. The final game against Japan draws 13.5 million viewers, a soccer record for ESPN. Somebody tells me there were 7,000 tweets per second during the final. There were plenty of doubters after we lost to Sweden, but America loves a good comeback story, and we are that. Hundreds of fans are waiting at our Frankfurt hotel to welcome us, treating us as if we won the PK shootout. I do spots on The Daily Show, Good Morning America, and CNN. Abby, Hope, and Alex are the breakout stars, but all of us are much better known now than we were even a week earlier.

  It’s all good, but James has me convinced that I have much more improvement left in me, and that is entirely my focus. For years I have been doing a lot of fitness work on my own, beyond the national team workouts, because I know I need to. Now I am doing even more. At tournaments, I sneak out of hotels to get in a distance run. Or I knock out a set of 800-meter runs, supplementing them with push-ups and sit-ups and ab work. I want to be at my strongest when others are starting to falter. I want to be the American Steven Gerrard, setting up teammates, creating chances, orchestrating the attack with quick feet and inexhaustible energy.

  The goal for 2012 is to peak at the London Olympics, and everything seems on course. We finish the Algarve Cup with a 4–0 thrashing of Sweden and then head to Japan for two friendlies, against Japan and Brazil. The day before the game against Japan, we tour the city of Sendai in the northeastern part of the country, one of the areas ravaged by the earthquake and tsunami almost exactly one year before. I look from the bus window at a vast expanse of wasteland, debris and shells of houses and battered boats planted on high ground, miles from the sea, where the earthquake started about fifteen miles beneath the floor. The nothingness goes on for miles. It is one of the most chilling spectacles I have ever seen. I can’t even imagine what it must’ve been like to live through it. Soccer seems totally inconsequential when you think about the scope of this sort of destruction and the death of almost 20,000 people.

  About six weeks before the Olympics, we play a friendly before a packed house at PPL Park in Chester, Pennsylvania. It’s just across the Delaware River from my home, so I’ve got a bunch of family and friends there, though not my parents, of course. Four years since I was told to leave the house, I am still an ex-Lloyd in my parents’ world. We’re wearing our new red-striped “Where’s Waldo” jerseys on a day so hot the pitch feels like a griddle. It’s the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.

  Nothing memorable comes out of it for me.

  Nothing memorable at all.

  Not including a meaningless post–World Cup Victory Tour friendly in the fall of 2011, I have started forty-one straight games for the U.S. Women’s National Team since returning from my broken ankle almost two years earlier. I get a rousing ovation when I am introduced to a hometown crowd before the game, and then I play forty-five forgettable minutes of football before Pia subs me out for Lauren Cheney.

  Most of our team struggles through an uninspiring half; it’s hard to believe we are the same side that played such strong, cohesive soccer in the World Cup final against Japan. We blast long balls up the field like rec players. Our back line gets panicky in the face of high Chinese pressure, and it spreads. We turn the ball over, make sloppy passes, leave openings for China to attack. Somehow we wind up with a 2–1 lead at the half, and I still can’t tell you how.

  Whether it’s because I am trying too hard in front of my people, I don’t know, but I am out of my element from the outset, losing the ball, playing helter-skelter, failing to convert two excellent chances inside the box. When Pia makes the switch, I am distraught. I am embarrassed. I go out with family and friends afterwards, but I have a hard time enjoying myself. I am in replay mode, maybe not as much as I was after I missed the PK against Japan, but close.

  Jill Ellis, an assistant coach under Pia, knows me as well as any coach in the national program and knows my predilection for beating myself up. She texts me and tells me to keep my head up, reminding me it’s one game and not to give it too much weight.

  Dawn Scott, our fitness coach, also texts me.

  “Keep fighting and move on,” she says.

  I head home for an eight-day break. I don’t hear from James for three full days, which is very unusual. He tells me later that he wanted me to sweat it out for a bit and think about my mistakes. I spend the time training hard and thinking harder. I am doing an upper-body workout in my garage when I finally hear from him. I’m still beating myself up, and it’s in that moment that I realize that I can’t have anyone at my events anymore. It changes things. I put too much pressure on myself to please people. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. Brian is planning on coming to London for the Olympics.

  “Please don’t,” I tell him. “I hope you understand it’s not about you. It’s about me.”

  My mind continues to race:

  I can’t believe that it’s still possible for me to have a game like this, after all the work I’ve put in. I thought I was beyond this point. I hate it. I hate that it’s staying with me. Hate that it’s affecting my confidence.

  We leave for a trip to Sweden and two games against the Swedes and the Japanese. In our first training session, I don’t feel well. I do okay, but mentally I might as well be in Greenland. I don’t even want the ball. I haven’t felt like this in a long time.

  Jill keeps trying to lift me up. One day Pia calls me up to her room to talk.

  “What do you think went on in the China game?” she asks.

  “I don’t know, I was just off that day, and it was weird because I had been doing really well in training. I’m human. It was just one of those days, I guess.”

  “Well, I just want you to know I believe in you one hundred percent,” Pia says. “If there is anything I can do to help you when your game is a bit off, please let me know.”

  “I will. Thanks,” I say.

  We have a couple day
s off from training, and I run both days. Before the first game, Pia wants to talk again. She comes in my room and tells me that I am not starting.

  “Cheney has been doing well, and she deserves to start,” Pia says. “But it’s going to be you and Boxxy and Cheney in the midfield during the Olympics, and we’re going to need all three of you. Just stay ready and make the most of your chance when it comes.”

  Though I can’t say I am shocked by this news, it is still tough to hear. I know I had a poor first half against China. I still think Pia is overreacting. I’ve been a fixture on this team for a couple of years. I’ve come up big in important moments. To get yanked from the lineup because of one bad half seems extreme.

  I do not tell Pia that. I sit on the bench, smoldering. When Pia calls for me to replace Boxxy, I do everything I’m supposed to do. I sit back and defend and tackle hard, play some good balls, and create chances. We win 3–1, and then we play Japan and I don’t start again. Pia comes up to me in the locker room beforehand and is smiling and laughing and puts her arm on my shoulder.

  “How are you?” she says.

  “I’m great,” I say.

  “Watch Cheney and Boxxy. You are going to come in at halftime.”

  I am still angry and play with an edge when I come on in the second half. I work hard on both sides of the ball. We win 4–1, and I can’t wait to get on the plane and get back home so I can work with James and train my butt off and prove to Pia she should never have taken me out of the starting lineup. Sometimes I have to work hard to find a slight to motivate me. I don’t have to work hard at all this time.

  I am going to show Pia Sundhage.

  We head out to Sandy, Utah, for our last friendly before we head to London for the Olympics. Pia must be enjoying these meetings with me because she calls for another one.