Culture
The USWNT mystique is gone – at some point, they either step up or they don't
For those who weren’t following along during the 2011 World Cup qualifying cycle — in which the U.S. lost to Mexico in the CONCACAF semifinals before Alex Morgan finally sent the U.S. through in a playoff series against Italy — matches against Mexico might have felt like a rivalry in name only.
The U.S. women’s national team had not lost to Mexico since that moment in 2010, and hadn’t lost to any CONCACAF opponent at home since 2000.
Monday night threw that narrative out the window.
The USWNT was outplayed in a 2-0 loss in front of a boisterous crowd in Carson, Ca., and while it didn’t match the low of that 0-0 draw against Portugal in the World Cup group stage last summer, the team’s final group stage match of this Gold Cup was (hopefully) a helpful reminder that the team hasn’t found their new, cohesive identity just yet.
The thing that should worry fans the most is how Monday’s performance was a reflection of the listless USWNT we’ve seen before.
But how much should we read into the 270 minutes played this year? How much does a loss change what needs to happen ahead of the Olympics? And why is cohesion still such a massive problem?
Mexico provided a necessary test — and a reminder
Mexico deserves full credit and nothing but praise for executing on Monday night in all the places that matter. But by the same token, the USWNT failed in many of those areas.
That failure can be helpful if used correctly (see: losses to France in friendlies at the start of 2015 and 2019, both of which were followed by World Cup titles). However, that’s been the takeaway for this U.S. team for a while now. At some point, the players and coaching staff either step up or they don’t.
What did the U.S. hierarchy want to get out of these games? If there was ever a time to let the team’s young players problem-solve in a difficult situation, it was on Monday night, down 1-0 to Mexico after the first half and with plenty of unproven talent on the field. Let them be tested. Let them fail, even! Instead, 34-year-old, 217-capped Morgan came on after the break. That doesn’t tell interim head coach Twila Kilgore or the incoming Emma Hayes anything about this team right now.
Morgan came on against Mexico (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
The USWNT mystique is gone, and the rising level of the rest of the world is only part of the story. The players used to wield their collective reputation and mentality as both sword and shield — it told them something about themselves, and something about every other team they faced. Without it, they have lost a weapon and something more symbolic.
Leaning into an old-fashioned underdog mentality might be the play, as ridiculous as it may sound considering the U.S. is still ranked No. 2 in the world by world governing body FIFA. There has been plenty written on the USWNT’s lack of joy since those very strange Tokyo Olympics, but less focus on a possible flip side: harnessing the anger for good as it sits in joy’s place.
With a generational shift underway, younger players who are hungry for recognition and results should take any emotional advantage they can find.
First though, they have to get onto the field.
Why is cohesion still such a massive problem?
It’s worth remembering that this Gold Cup is the USWNT’s first camp of the year, and that it’s still preseason for the large chunk of this roster that plays domestically in the NWSL. That’s not necessarily an excuse for the cohesion issues that plagued the USWNT on Monday, but it is at least helpful context, along with the massive rotation in personnel that’s happened through the group stage.
Center back Naomi Girma feels like the key to solving this problem, immediately and in the long term. Though it’s understandable to want to manage her load, Girma has already ascended to the tier of player that you need on the field at all times. She’s been through a World Cup now too — and was the USWNT’s best player in New Zealand and Australia by a very comfortable margin.
Girma facing Argentina (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
“Something tonight that was missing was just a bit of bravery from the center backs and willingness to play forward,” Kilgore said postgame. “Regardless of how many numbers we have in front of the backline, the expectation is that we look to play forward passes, that we keep the ball moving, and of course that sometimes requires a balance and it comes back, but we do want to play forward.”
If the team’s identity is built upon playing out of the back, it feels like having your best defender — a 23-year-old who the team will build around for the next decade — on the field for the toughest group-stage match would have been a more effective use of Girma than pairing her with Tierna Davidson against Argentina.
USWNT defender Kelley O’Hara said on Monday that the team had sometimes been “stuck” within certain formations and tactics over the past couple of years, and the performance against Mexico had the same feel as some of the team’s more frustrating recent performances. On a night like Monday, it feels like the USWNT is clinging to the very identity they need to shed, and some beautiful principles of play that are great in theory and sometimes need to go out the window when a game calls for it.
It’s impossible to know from the outside if the coaching situation is playing a role here — everything coming from the team (publicly, at least) is that communication from Hayes and Kilgore has been excellent and everyone understands the plan until Hayes arrives from Chelsea in May.
Hayes not being present until then isn’t ideal on a number of fronts, but it’s simply a fact the USWNT must deal with. The federation made this agreement, and now the team is dealing with the ramifications of playing under an interim head coach stationed a continent away a few months before a major tournament. It’s not ideal and it’s not something that can be changed.
How much can we read into starting XIs and playing time?
The answer for me is still: “Not much at all.” But so you can see the three games side-by-side, here are the line-ups…
Rotation was promised by Kilgore, and she delivered. With the media after Monday’s game, she bristled a bit at a question about whether that rotation had backfired.
“The whole group is prepared to play,” she answered. “The whole group was prepared to play tonight. We could have gone with several options, and this was the group that we chose. I’m very confident that the group is capable of executing.”
Kilgore said that it was important for all players to have opportunities in this tournament, but also important for the team to execute.
“It’s not just about partnerships, it’s about systems, roles and responsibilities,” she said.
From my vantage point outside the privileged bubble of the USWNT technical staff, the Gold Cup still feels like the right place for experimentation, evaluation and rotation. But if you’re going to do it, you have to actually commit.
(Top photo: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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