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I
T WOULD be easy to view this dominant World Cup
run as an inevitability, a constant march onward and
upward. Here we go again. The journey of the past
four years, however, was anything but painless. In
August 2016, at the Rio Olympics, the U.S. suffered a quarter-
final elimination to Sweden—the team’s earliest exit from a
major tournament—in which Rapinoe, on the wrong side of
30 and hampered by a right-knee injury, looked as if she might
be finished with international soccer. Then in ’17, coach Jill
Ellis, vowing to unlock more creativity in the attack, launched
a period of experimentation, with new formations and players.
Real change, though, can be an ugly and uncomfortable process
long before it becomes glorious.
The grimmest moment came on March 8, 2017, at the SheBe-
lieves Cup, in Washington, D.C., where a thoroughly disjointed
U.S. team (having already lost 1–0 to England) went down 2–0
after nine minutes to France. Ellis tried a 3-5-2 formation and
left a slew of regulars on the bench: Alex Morgan, Julie Ertz,
Crystal Dunn, Lindsey Horan, Kelley O’Hara. The resulting
3–0 defeat left U.S. fans and media howling.
“I remember thinking after that loss that we had a long way
to go,” O’Hara, the right back in France, said. “But that’s kind
of a good thing, you know? You don’t ever want to feel like it’s
easy all the time and there’s no obstacles or need for growth.
After 2016, [Ellis said,] ‘I’m about to put this team through
an evolution that I feel is necessary to win us a World Cup
in 2019.’ And as hard as that was—it was hectic and stressful
and full of uncertainty for a lot of people—it was necessary. I
respect her a lot for doing that and sticking to her guns, and
I respect the individuals on this team and how we handled
ourselves through that time.”
Adds Morgan, “You have to give credit to Jill for looking at
new things throughout the course of the last three years in
order to see what the right direction was for us.... It was a
little bit of experimenting, and she did it in a way that a lot of
people criticized. But when you get to where we are now, you
can’t help but applaud that.”
Not that everyone was applauding at the time. After a
1–0 home loss to Australia in July 2017 at the Tournament of
Nations, several U.S. veterans went to then federation president
Sunil Gulati and expressed deep concerns with Ellis’s com-
munication off the field and the team’s declining performance
on it. If those concerns weren’t addressed, they said, they
wanted a new coach. At a meeting several months later Gulati
responded to the team and said Ellis, who was in the room,
wasn’t going anywhere before World Cup 2019—a decision
backed by Cordeiro, who succeeded Gulati in February ’18.
Winning has a way of easing tensions, however, and in
2018 the U.S. went undefeated as Ellis and her offensive guru,
assistant Tony Gustavsson, landed on a 4-3-3 formation that
was much more freewheeling than that of the ’15 World Cup
champions. The linchpins: an explosive starting front line
(Rapinoe, Morgan, and Tobin Heath) with remarkable depth
(Carli Lloyd, Christen Press, and Mallory Pugh as subs!) and
Ertz playing an indispensable defensive-midfield role. Con-
cerns over the defense would continue into the World Cup,
especially when it came to Hope Solo’s untested goalkeeping
replacement, Alyssa Naeher, but Naeher proved herself when
it mattered most in France, making two giant saves (one of
them on a late penalty) in a 2–1 semifinal win over England.
Ellis’s experimentation also unearthed some gems. One
of the fresh starters in the D.C. debacle was a 21-year-old
midfielder from Cincinnati named Rose Lavelle, who was
making her second appearance with the national team. “I got
subbed out at halftime because I was pretty awful,” Lavelle says.
“I remember thinking, Wow, that’s like the top of the top. I
need to get better, and that’s where I need to be in the next
couple of years if I want to compete for a spot on this team.”
Now 24, Lavelle is the World Cup’s breakout star, the U.S.’s
creative maestro in both the semifinal and the final. Watching
her in full flight on the ball is exhilarating, one of the elemental
thrills of the sport, not just for what it reveals in the present
but also for what it portends of her limitless future. In the
69th minute against the Netherlands she found herself with a
half-acre of space in the middle of the field and went to work,
bamboozling Dutch defender Stefanie van der Gragt to create
room for her left-footed knockout punch.
In becoming the first coach to win back-to-back World Cups
in the women’s game, Ellis had to use nearly all the capital
she’d won in 2015 to remake her U.S. team. “Coming out of
the Olympics, it was a moment to kind of reflect and look at
making sure we played competitive games and increased our
68
SPORT S ILLUS TR ATED
• JULY 15, 2019
WOMEN’S WORLD CUP
It would be easy to view this World Cup run as an inevitability. Here we go again.
The journey of the past four years, however, was anything but painless.
