Brazil’s 18-woman roster for the Olympics was announced on Friday and included Orlando Pride ace and one of the greatest players of all-time, Marta. The 35-year-old’s reaction to hearing her name called to represent her country in Tokyo is what this sport is all about.
The moment Marta found out she made Brazil's Olympic roster for the fifth time
Megan Rapinoe has made headlines for two very different reasons. The famous clothing brand Victoria’s Secret announced on Wednesday the company plans to have the USWNT star, transgender model Valentina Sampaio, actress Priyanka Chopra Jones and other women fill the role of the “angels” typically seen from the brand.
Victoria’s Secret said in a statement that it will “build new, deeper relationships with all women.”
The USWNT brought in 20,500 fans for the grand opening of Q2 Stadium in Austin, Texas, and defeated Nigeria 2-0 in the final game of the Summer Series. Christen Press will go down in history as the first player to score a goal in Q2 Stadium history.
In stoppage time of the first half Carli Lloyd found Press with a quick-thinking pass which the American winger curled in for her 61st international goal.
On the mark
U.S. Soccer released its latest uniform on Wednesday morning that both the women and men’s teams will be wearing for the foreseeable future. The new USWNT kit reveal video is what has stood out the most.
Before getting into the reveal video, here are the new jerseys. Some pun-mastermind is real proud of themselves for the whole “stars in stripes” saying.
The new USMNT and USWNT away jersey has dropped pic.twitter.com/2aKT5vcO8N
Carli Lloyd entered the USWNT’s June training camp knowing she couldn’t risk taking it easy with just 18 roster spots available for the Tokyo Olympics in July. She didn’t help her case when over-celebrating for a goal where she was clearly offside against Portugal on Thursday.
Carli Lloyd is a woman on a mission to prove she deserves to be on the USWNT’s flight to Japan for the Olympics. When she thought she had doubled her team’s lead against Portugal on Thursday night, she sent head coach Vlatko Andonovski a message. There was only one tiny problem with that Carli Lloyd celebration: the goal didn’t count.
If Thursday's USWNT vs. Portugal friendly was just an adventure in playing without Julie Ertz, it wasn’t the most pleasant trip. Defensively, Lindsey Horan did a great job of protecting the back four with Alyssa Naeher recording only one save.
But it was all sluggish going forward in Houston with the temp reading 86° and 69% humidity. The front three of Alex Morgan, Christen Press and Megan Rapinoe failed to largely trouble Inês Pereira, while Rose Lavelle wasn’t able to make her mark over 90 minutes.
Soccer coaches are faced with countless unenviable problems every day: How to go about training, how to set the team up for matches, how to meld personalities into a single unit. But one problem every coach would love to have is what Vlatko Andonovski is facing ahead of this summer’s Olympics: How to cut some of the best players in the world.
History is written by the victors. When you reminisce about the biggest finals of recent times, you’re likely thinking of players like Megan Rapinoe at the 2019 World Cup, Kylian Mbappé in 2018, Carli Lloyd in 2015 or Mario Götze in 2014.
But there are those rare instances when an individual’s performance on the losing team — for better (Zinedine Zidane in 2006) or worse (Loris Karius in 2018) — lives just as vividly in the memory.
As much as people love to hate on 2020 for being a crappy year, the sad truth is that as the calendar turns to 2021, our problems won’t magically go away. It’ll be many months — years even — until the Covid-19 vaccine can be fully administered to the global population. Most of the world’s governments are still doing everything in their power to ignore climate change. And let’s not forget police officers are still shooting unarmed Black men with near impunity. But one thing the change in year will bring about is more games on the 2021 USWNT schedule.