The U.S. and England can be expected to enter next year’s Women’s World Cup as favorite and challenger. Friday’s game was a chance to establish which team would occupy which role.
LONDON — For now, at least, Vlatko Andonovski remains unbowed. Just a few minutes after watching his United States team defeated for the first time in more than a year, he was happily casting his mind forward to next summer’s World Cup final.
The best measure of his confidence was not his insistence that he would not mind running into England there — it was that his working assumption was that his side’s presence is not far off certain.
He was not, though, the only one whose mind was wandering after England’s 2-1 victory on Friday night. The mind of Sarina Wiegman, the England coach, was doing it, too.
“You do not win a World Cup in October,” she said. “It is not July yet. But it is really good to have this moment now, in our preparation for it. It is good to have a test against the United States, because they have won so many things for years and years. It was very good to see where we are. We showed to ourselves that we can do it.”
Strictly speaking, of course, there was nothing riding on this meeting of the longstanding world champion and the recently crowned European champion at Wembley Stadium. There was no glittering prize for victory, no lasting pain for defeat.
It was, instead, intended as a showpiece and a showcase: a chance for England, fresh from winning its maiden international honor, to enjoy a celebratory homecoming and an opportunity for the United States to stretch its legs on European soil. Though neither set of players would have wished it, it became a chance, too, to display solidarity in the aftermath of the Yates Report, which this week detailed systemic abuse of players in women’s soccer in the United States.
Meaning, though, is established by consensus. And, deep down, both sides knew that the idea that this was a friendly, an exhibition, was a lie. It is the United States and England, after all, who have “stretched clear” of the pack, as Megan Rapinoe put it, and who stand as the two undisputed powerhouses of women’s soccer. It is the United States and England who can be expected to go into next year’s World Cup as favorite and challenger. Wembley was the chance to establish which team would occupy which role.
It is too simplistic, though, to say that England’s victory establishes its primacy. That it is the more settled, the more cogent of the two at this stage — still 10 months out from the finals — is a fair assessment; that it is the beneficiary of a swelling momentum, built during its golden summer and nourished by overcoming the United States, the sport’s historical hegemon, is not in doubt.
For considerable stretches of the game, England looked every inch the coming force: crisper, slicker, more inventive in possession than its visitor, more capable of controlling and varying the speed of the game, more ruthless on the counterattack, more purposeful in its press. It deserved its early lead, secured through Lauren Hemp, and it deserved to wrestle it back, too, with Georgia Stanway atoning for gifting Sophia Smith an equalizer by converting a penalty soon after.
Andonovski’s counterargument, though, would be no less compelling. Nobody would pretend this has been an easy week for any of his players, regardless of their professionalism, their determination to focus on the game or the old and flawed cliché that the game itself, the sport around which an entire rotten industry has been built, can provide solace and sanctuary and momentary escape. They have all been forced to confront others’ trauma and relive their own.
Even had they been able to focus as they would have wished — as they deserved to — they could reasonably point out that their squad was not at full strength. Alex Morgan, Mallory Pugh and Sam Mewis were among those absent. Andonovski, too, is still finessing the incorporation of a new generation of talent, led by the likes of Smith and Trinity Rodman. This team is a work in progress, and its construction is not scheduled to be finished until it arrives in Australia and New Zealand to play the world championship next year.
And yet, despite all of that, it only lost to the European champion — the very best the rest of the world has to offer, on home turf and backed by a highly partisan crowd — by the finest of margins.
Rodman had an exquisitely crafted goal ruled out for the sort of cruel, infinitesimal offside that is enough to turn anyone against the very concept of technology. Rapinoe was denied the chance to convert a late penalty, to extend a win streak that had grown to 13 games, by a rather more obvious intervention by the video assistant referee.
More significantly still, Smith was the outstanding player on the field — other than, perhaps, the fearless Keira Walsh — and a constant source of terror to England’s back line. Andonovski might have no objections to seeing England in the World Cup final next year. The English, one suspects, would rather not run into Smith again any time soon.
That both Andonovski and Wiegman felt comfortable enough to bring up the World Cup — to dispense with the bromide that this was just a friendly, just an exhibition, almost as soon as the final whistle had gone — can be traced, perhaps, to the fact that both would have seen enough in this game to confirm their beliefs.
England knows now that it can beat the United States, that it can meet the sport’s gold standard. The United States, in turn, can feel that at full strength things might have been very different. Both can make it mean what they want it to mean.
And that consensus can hold, now, for a few more months, right up until they meet again, on a stage still grander than this one, when there will be something at stake, when the pretense can be safely abandoned, and when there are prizes for the victors and pain for the defeated. Wiegman is right, of course: The World Cup is not concluded in October. But both she and Andonovski, as their minds wandered, saw Wembley as the moment that it started.
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