A more group of overrated, pathetic soccer players you will not find. The so called US Women’s National Soccer team couldn’t score against Australia ending in a 0-0 tie. That was still good enough because of their weak bracket to advance to the next round. So far the US Hags have won just one of three games they’ve played at the Olympics in Tokyo.
At the top, it should be stated that there were plenty of reasons for the U.S. Women’s National Team to never take their foot off the brakes this morning against Australia. Going balls-out wouldn’t have won them the group, with Sweden getting their gimme against New Zealand at the same time. No matter where the U.S. finishes, the quarterfinal is in just three days. It’s Japan in the summer, so the humidity level is somewhere around “soup.” And, as we’ll circle back to in a bit, this U.S. squad is either not fully fit due to some key injuries, just plain fuckin’ older, or some combination thereof.
So clearly getting a breather when and where you can might be vital.
Still, given the utter paddling they got from Sweden, some of the signs in the 0-0 draw with Australia leave questions that either don’t have answers yet or carry some uneasy implications. It was extremely odd to see the U.S. as passive as they were, with Australia racking up nearly 65 percent of the possession time. The U.S. didn’t really engage the Matildas until the halfway line for most of the match. We’re used to the U.S. pressing far higher, betting that teams can’t play their way through them and then tearing into the spaces after turnovers.
Again, this could be tactical, given the roster and schedule crunch of the Olympics, and it’s not like the Aussies rained down chances upon the U.S. And pressing like your relatives are being held captive in these conditions with the games so tightly packed could be a recipe for trouble down the road. We don’t know what the instructions were.