When Nobody Was Watching

by Carli Lloyd

  We take a charter flight to Winnipeg, Canada. It is June 2015, and my third World Cup is days away. Neither of the first two went anything close to the way I had hoped.

  It is time to change the narrative.

  16

  Disappearing Act

  I AM LOOKING AT MYSELF on a computer screen, and the images aren’t pretty. I am in our team meeting room in our Winnipeg hotel, sitting at a long folding table, flanked by Jill Ellis on one side and her assistants, Tony Gustavsson and Steve Swanson, on the other. It is the day before we open our World Cup against Australia, and Jill and Steve want to show me video clips of various fouls I’ve committed in some of our recent games. Most were for coming in from behind, or for putting a little too much crunch into my tackles. One of them came in the first half against Mexico just a few weeks earlier, when I went in late and hard on a sliding tackle a couple of seconds after I got whacked; there was no call.

  I got whistled for a foul but didn’t get a card, even though I could have.

  The point of the video review is to caution me about excessive aggression. Of course they want me to be physical and make crunching tackles, but they also want to remind me that two yellows in the World Cup group stage means you sit for a game.

  “We just need you to be careful,” Jill says. “We don’t want you to change your game. We want you to make good tackles and win possession for us. Just don’t go overboard with it—maybe throttle it back a bit, especially when you are coming in from behind.”

  I get it.

  “Believe me, the last thing I want is to miss a World Cup game,” I assure them. “I’ll be careful.”

  I file a mental note about it and go for a walk in downtown Winnipeg. I sit by the edge of a fountain. The sound of the flowing water is soothing. I start to write in my journal. I have been keeping a journal since I first made the national team in 2006. Besides being therapeutic, it gives me an in-the-moment record of my thoughts and feelings, successes and stresses; it’s a competitive and emotional archive. This day’s entry focuses on the great place I am in mentally, the supreme self-belief that comes when you feel that you are truly a better player than you have ever been.

  I have never been more ready to play. I am relieved to know that Brian, Jaime, my aunt Patti, and everybody else knows not to come to Canada. I debate once again whether it seems harsh to not share this experience with my fiancé, but come to the same conclusion: I know how I am—if Brian were here, I’d be thinking about him and wanting to be sure he was okay. I had family at my two previous World Cups, and given the outcomes, I do not want to go for the hat trick.

  I am rooming with Hope, who always has the TV on to check out games in other groups from all over Canada. I don’t want to watch one second. I just want to play. That’s it. I am completely in a mental bunker.

  Day breaks sunny and warm on June 8, 2015. I sleep well and have eggs, yogurt, and fruit—my usual pregame meal. Once breakfast settles, I head out for my fifteen-minute game-day run from our hotel, down St. Mary Avenue in downtown Winnipeg, past streets named Hargrave and Donald and Smith, toward the Red River. When my watch hits seven and a half minutes, I turn around and head back. I stretch and hydrate and shower, then have a light lunch—salad and fruit. I never eat anything heavy on game days. I want to feel light, hungry.

  Outside our hotel we pass through a gauntlet of fans who cheer as we board the bus for the short ride to the University of Manitoba. I head for my seat in the back, cue up “Dreamer” on my iPod, and reread the email James has sent. Jill gathers us together before we head out and goes over some last-second strategic reminders.

  The stadium is packed, and it’s so loud and overwhelmingly pro-American that we might as well be back in the States.

  Sitting quietly in the locker room moments before our walkout, I am feeling oddly out of sorts. My legs are leaden.

  You’ll feel better when you get out there and start running, I tell myself.

  Australia kicks off and applies pressure almost immediately. In the fifth minute, Australian Emily van Egmond blasts a shot that Hope stops with a diving punchout. Moments later, I touch the ball for only the second time in the game and give it away deep in our end. No harm comes of it, but I am sick that I did that.

  You are better than that. This is the World Cup you’ve been waiting for years for. C’mon, Carli. Raise your game, I tell myself.

  The game continues. We are playing poorly, losing possession, knocking random long balls up the field. I don’t complete my first pass until the ninth minute. I make a clean, strong tackle for a takeaway and hope that it is something to build on and get me into the game.

  It is not.

  I don’t feel like myself. I feel passive. The leaden sensation never lifts. I can’t stop thinking of the film session with Jill and her assistants, and I can feel myself backing off too much, almost becoming a bystander. Going in hard on tackles isn’t just a trademark of mine. It’s a part of my game plan. I always make a point to have a crunching tackle early in a game. Not to be dirty or to cheap-shot anybody. Just to let my opponents know what they are going to be up against when they are pressing the attack in the midfield. It’s another item from the James playbook: crunching tackles early can set the tone for an entire game, the same way a baseball pitcher might come up and in on a hot hitter in his first at-bat.

  But against Australia I am not crunching. I am barely even tapping. It’s all so weird. I am just not myself, and we as a team are not ourselves either. Pinoe scores on a deflected strike, and that’s about the only good thing I can say about the first half, which ends with us tied at one, even though we’ve been outplayed throughout. We have our savior in red—Hope Solo—to thank for that. After the early stop on van Egmond, she turned away two more dangerous chances that easily could’ve left us looking at a two-goal deficit at the half.

  Jill has made it clear throughout the run-up to the World Cup that we don’t want to peak too early. It is, after all, a monthlong tournament.

  “I am not looking for us to play our best game against Australia,” she said.

  She need not have worried.

  We are playing defensively, allowing Australia to dominate possession. Lauren Holiday and I, the center mids, are under instruction to play as number sixes—or holding midfielders—and play the ball out wide. We’re not connecting with the forward line, threading through balls, or changing fields. It feels as if we’re stuck in neutral for almost all of the ninety minutes. Australia is a solid and improving side, but the Aussies have never beaten us. You never would’ve guessed that watching the first half.

  I feel horrible in the locker room at halftime, low in energy and spirit.

  The second half starts better when I make a good strip in the opening two minutes, but then I have too much weight on my pass and it rolls out of bounds. On and on it goes for me. I make a promising run after delivering a pass, but it misses the mark and goes the other way. We raise our game enough to take a 3–1 victory on second-half goals by Press and another one from Pinoe, but we can’t let ourselves be fooled by the final score. It was a sloppy effort almost from start to finish, and Hope bailed us out.

  My number-one objective going into our second group game—against Pia Sundhage and Sweden—is to wipe out my mental hard-drive and reboot. There is nothing else to do. I resolve to start now, to join the battle in our second game and bring all I’ve got.

  “In the grand scheme of things, nobody is going to remember much about who did what in the first game of the World Cup,” James reminds me.

  Before I even get to game day, though, another unscripted chapter unfolds. In an interview published in the New York Times, Pia makes some sharply critical comments about me and several others, notably Hope and Abby.

  “Carli Lloyd was a challenge to coach,” Pia tells the Times. “When she felt that we had faith in her, she could be one of the best players. But if she began to question that faith, she could be one of the worst.

  “It
was so delicate, so, so delicate.”

  Apart from Pia being wrong—if I am so delicate, how did I come back from being benched to score both goals to win Pia her second Olympic gold medal?—I feel completely betrayed. I played my heart out for her. I helped her build an international reputation. I was completely loyal to her, even when others were trying to push her out.

  This is my thanks?

  I tell the press that Pia is way off base, and I will prove it on the field. It is a good answer, a classy answer. The only problem is that in our second World Cup game I do not prove anything on the field.

  I spend most of the ninety minutes trying to be perfect instead of just playing. I am not attacking, not taking risks, and playing with a strange reticence, like a swimmer who dips her toe in the pool but is afraid to dive in. Most of our team seems similarly afflicted, and with Sweden staying compact and organized in its end, our chances are few.

  The highlight for me is when I play a good ball forward to Press, who plays it off to Pinoe, who threads it back to me as I make a run on the left side. My leaning, left-footed strike is batted over the crossbar by the Swedish keeper Hedvig Lindahl, and the game remains scoreless. It’s a quality save, but not nearly as good as Meghan Klingenberg’s. Standing on the goal line during a scramble off a corner kick, Kling watches Sweden’s Caroline Seger artfully flick a ball with the outside of her right foot toward our goal. Hope is out of the play, and it seems to be a lock to go in, but then five-feet, two-inch Kling jumps as high as she can go, heading the ball into the crossbar and safely away. The game ends 0–0.

  Though we are atop Group D, you would never know it by the way we are getting ripped for our listless, unimaginative play, especially on the offensive end. Our back line and Hope have been superb, and somehow that is what we have morphed into, a defense-first side that doesn’t want to commit numbers on the attack and is displaying a lack of patience and skill when we do attack.

  After the game, when Jill asks Holiday and me to meet with her, the topic is all about our defensive angles and how we can’t let ourselves get split when we defending.

  I walk out of that meeting feeling even worse.

  I am not even defending the right way, I think.

  We fly west to Vancouver for our third Group D game, against Nigeria, a dangerous, physically gifted team that put up three goals on Sweden. My mental demons are running amok as the game approaches. I feel as if I’ve let the team down, myself down, and James down. How could someone who a mere week ago was poised to have the tournament of her life suddenly turn into an MIA midfielder with a number 10 on her back?

  Knowing I’m not in a good frame of mind, Hope invites me to join her and her husband Jerramy for lunch and then for a drive into the mountains. We ride on a gondola, and the majesty of the Canadian Rockies is breathtaking. It takes me to a different mental place, turns off that endless self-critical loop for a while. Afterwards, we take in a lumberjack show, an attraction that I don’t run across too often in South Jersey. There’s ax-throwing and logrolling and crosscut sawing, beefy men in red flannel shirts everywhere you look. I’m not contemplating a career change, but it’s cool to see people who are really into what they do.

  Back down at sea level, the biggest challenge facing me isn’t how I am playing. It is how I am thinking. I have almost no clarity. I am judging myself without mercy. I am in danger of wallowing my way right out of the World Cup. About the only thing I feel sure about is that if there is anyone who can help quiet the noise in my head, it is my trainer of twelve years.

  James Galanis.

  So we talk. James reminds me that Nigeria represents another opportunity for a fresh start, and he has a good idea of how to make the most of it.

  “Start small when you go out there,” he says. “Don’t take big risks or play long through balls in the beginning. Keep it simple. Focus on having a clean touch and making a clean pass. Once you start to feel better and your confidence improves, then you start doing more involved things. The important thing is to create some success, build up a nice body of work over the first half, say, and let’s see where we go from there.”

  On a designed play off the opening kickoff, I ping a fifty-yard ball on target to Abby’s head, and it almost results in a goal in the first twenty seconds. It’s as good a ball as I’ve played in three games, an encouraging way to start. James’s plan seems to be working. I am easing into things, resisting the urge to do too much, taking better care of the ball, not fretting so much about making mistakes. In the fourteenth minute, I yank an open left-footed shot from distance way wide, not a good strike at all, but I don’t get down on myself, and a few minutes later I send a perfect twenty-yard ball on the ground up the middle for Alex to run onto.

  Jill still has me deeper in the midfield than I’d prefer, but Holiday and I are a bit more involved, and we’re starting to combine on a few things offensively. I just miss converting a sliding chance off of a set piece by the left post late in the half, before Abby pounds in a corner kick in the forty-fifth minute to give us a lead. The half is far from a masterpiece, but it’s the best we’ve played so far.

  Keep playing simply, let the game come to you, I tell myself at the half.

  In the fifty-seventh minute, Pinoe has the ball on the right side and plays a nice square ball for me about five yards outside the box. I have space, and I am about to run onto it and bury it when the ball clips the referee’s foot. It never reaches me. I fling up my arms in frustration and run back to defend. I wonder what else could possibly go haywire in this tournament.

  We advance to the knockout round with a 1–0 victory, but I can’t escape the feeling that, even with a slight upgrade against Nigeria, my World Cup has been an abject disaster and the U.S. is advancing, not because of me, but in spite of me.

  Is that an overreaction? No doubt it is. The problem again is my level of expectation, my quest for perfection. It skews everything. When it flares up, it robs me of joy.

  Jill reassures me again that it will be fine and that even top players go through these rough patches. The next day she and Michelle French, an assistant coach, show me clips of the Nigeria game, highlighting opportunities I had to change the pace of things and play a greater variety of passes, the way I do when I am right. Switching fields and knocking accurate, long-range passes are two of my strengths. Now I am playing as if the ball is covered with poison ivy and I just want to get it away from me.

  We fly to Edmonton to get ready to play Colombia five days later. Our hotel is near a shopping mall, and on an off day James all but orders me to do some retail therapy.

  “Don’t train. Don’t work out. Don’t even think about soccer,” James says. “Give yourself a break.”

  I hit Banana Republic and J. Crew and a few other stores, picking up a few things. It’s not as mind-clearing as the gondola and the lumberjacks, but at least I stop overanalyzing everything for a while. The day off is good. I go back to work and concentrate on all the basics—my first touches, the weight of my passes, my shooting mechanics—and being aware of all the options that are out there for me on the field. Seeing those film clips with Jill and Frenchie helps. I need to get back to my attacking mentality.

  I am tired of playing it safe.

  Do not underestimate the power of a single goal. Even a goal that comes from the penalty spot. In the sixty-sixth minute of our game against Colombia, we are holding a 1–0 lead in an unexpectedly tight game when Pinoe gets dragged down in the box after making a strong run off a well-placed pass from Kling. The whistle blows. The referee points to the spot, our second PK opportunity in seventeen minutes. Abby took the first one, after the Colombia keeper was red-carded for tripping Alex in the penalty area. She took it left-footed. She knocked it wide.

  Abby looks at me and nods. She is our number-one PK taker, and I am number two. I look back at her. Her message is clear: This one is yours.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  She nods again.

  I step u
p and put the ball on the spot. I walk back a half-dozen steps or so and wait for the whistle. I typically prepare for a PK the night before, visualizing how I am going to approach it. Sometimes I might change it up if I see something in the keeper’s positioning or her approach (sorry, I am not sharing any state secrets about the variables involved). More often I stick with my plan. This time I calmly drill the ball in the right center of the net as the keeper dives the other way.

  Up by two goals now, we should be in good shape, even if we are still not reminding anybody of FC Barcelona with our creative playmaking. While Colombia’s midfielder, Yoreli Rincon, my friend and former teammate, shows brief flourishes of great skill, as do her teammates, we continue to lurch impatiently around the box, showing little ability to break down the defense with any consistency.

  Even when Colombia has to play a man down after the red card, we are not able to generate a whole lot. Whether it’s bad passes or poor decision-making, our possession game isn’t sharp, and that makes us dependent on a great individual play to create something. Kling delivers just that to set up my PK, slipping a sweet ball over to start Pinoe on her run. About ten minutes later, it’s my turn to try to make a play. I get the ball in the attacking third, take a couple of people on, then hit a curling, right-footed shot toward the right side of the goal. The Colombian keeper dives to her left and smothers it. I thought it had a chance and am bummed it didn’t go in, but that’s okay.

  This is more like it, I think. I’m starting to feel like myself.

  I can’t tell you for sure, but I don’t think I’d have made that run if I hadn’t scored on the PK. The goal doesn’t just put me on the board literally; it helps set me free psychologically. I’m nowhere near where I want to be, but I am getting closer.