I think the implication is that those players are only considered elite because their competition is so shitty. Once countries that actually know how to develop players get women’s soccer programs they’ll shoot by the US.
Awesome Zidane like goal by Colombia.
I agree with your analysis. Maybe nations should adopt the Dutch rule that no non EU player may recieve less than the average Ereviste wage so that each country might better develop their own players. The average Premier League wage would be prohibitive enough that many more spots would be open for UK players,
I was pulling for Colombia, but that mysterious foul call had me hoping for a Mexican miracle at the end.
Meanwhile Costa Rica pulls off the upset to draw Spain 1-1, despite being comically outshot and outpossessed.
It wouldnt be a World Cup without the FIFA officiating 
Buried in this Dallas Morning News article about the lack of Texas players (read: none) on the national team is a bit of speculation that may have some meat to it on a national level.
The ones calling the game weren’t calling it domination. When you dominate a game, you give up almost no real goal scoring chances and are creating chance after chance for yourself. The Aussies were better and created several good chances, but were hardly peppering the goal with shoat after shot. Not exactly domination no matter what Alexi Lalas says.
Yeah, this is a national issue. I think it’s slowly changing, but it’s still a problem.
To be fair, when it comes to soccer at least, Alexi Lalas is an imbecile. He’s either totally wrong or, the occasions when he’s right, it’s so obvious so is everyone else watching the game if they’re at minimum half awake.
This is the same reason that is often given for England’s situation (with regard to the men). Could be true, the best development programs (Barcelona, Ajax) don’t focus on results until players reach there late teens.
The focus on physicality is a well known phenomenon among the boys teams too. If you go take a look at the birth month of most US youth national teams you get January through March vastly overrepresented.
And in other sports as well. Relative age bias has the ultimate effect of prematurely weeding out a large percentage of the talent pool. It’s a really interesting subject and a problem that no one at the national level appears to be taking great pains to resolve, even though it seems that the solutions aren’t really all that difficult in this age of year-round sports.
I saw Brazil - Korea.
If someone would translate the offside rule into Korean (for both the offense and defense), and explain that you’re supposed to put the ball in the goal not above it, they could be an OK team. decent tactically, generally strong defending (with two massive mistakes). Nobody who can put a shot actually on net, but everything else is OK. Maybe they thought they were playing rugby or US football where you get points for field goals?
Brazil wasn’t overwhelming. Their first half offense was ‘Kick the ball from midfield past everyone into the penalty area and see if Marta has developed superhuman speed since the last time we tried it thirty seconds ago’ (spoiler alert: she didn’t. Lots of easy touches for the Korean keeper). The second half offense developed some more possession, even some chances, but in the end Brazil couldn’t get a goal from the run of play: their goals came on a Korean turnover that not only gift-wrapped the goal for Brazil, if offered to help unwrap it, and on a similar turnover that led to a marginal (not clearly wrong but could have been let go) penalty kick.
Hey speaking of which, the Women’s World Cup probably has a way to go to catch up to the men as far as bribery and dead workers goes, but they may even have shot ahead in the ‘inconsistent refereeing from one match to another’ category. As tight as US-Australia was, this was loose like two inmates from New York. My working theory is that the referee had spent a lot of money on a new whistle, didn’t like it, and thought if she didn’t use it at all, she could still return it to the store. That, or some kind of performance art commentary on how theoretically impartial refereeing can still favor one side. Kind of like the bit about how the law in its majestic equality forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges, this referee, in her majestic equality allowed both Brazil and Korea to use their size and speed to continually push the other team off the ball. If you’re saying “Korea’s size and speed?” you’re getting the point. Come to think of it, maybe the Koreans had a good reason to think they were playing rugby.
WC reffing has always been inconsistent. Remember when the Australian mens team was denied a win over Italy by a bogus penalty call? Then there was this work of brilliance by Graham Poll…
I dunno, penalties being called after blatant Italian flopping always seemed to me to be one of the most consistent things in all of soccer.
I very much agree about the (non) refereeing in the Brazil-SK game, and it was tremendously frustrating to watch. One thing I really like about the women’s game is precisely the fact that there is a lot less of the brute-force physical approach to one-on-one defense. It seems to much more often come down to skill vs. skill rather than just seeing who can muscle the opponent off the ball, compared to the men’s game. Brazil was doing a lot of the brute-force muscle thing with the referee’s acquiescence, with predictable results against Koreans, who as a people tend toward the small and slight. I really, really don’t want to see the women’s game move in this direction.
On the bright side, if you average that and the US-Australia game (where just about any contact at all above the waist was a whistle), they’re in about the right spot.
This was something that the (Spanish) commentators for the Ecuador vs Cameroon game were saying, only… Well, they were talking about how the Ecuadorian players were trying to play very physically, to their detriment, as it seemed they were taken more force and becoming more hurt than the Cameroonians. :o
Germany was up 1-0 over Norway within 5 minutes, had at one point outshot them something like 18-1…
…and now it’s 1-1 in the 82nd minute after Norway scored on an absolutely perfect direct kick.
Is there another goal in this one somewhere?
Canadians - What is Cazprom? They seem to be a major sponsor of the WC, but I’ve never heard of them.
One of the Norwegian players is getting the crap beat out of her but the ref refuses to call a thing. She’s getting mugged about every five minutes. Norway just botched a good chance. A lot of passes are going long. Turf sucks.
Are you sure it isnt Gazprom the major Russian energy conglomerate? And future James Bond target.