Colombia Soccer Quotes

The Americans didn’t know it yet, however, but that win over Colombia was serendipitous in an unexpected way. Yellow cards given to both Lauren Holiday (née Cheney) and Megan Rapinoe meant that Jill Ellis would be forced to change her tactics. The team was about to fix all of its midfield problems. A blessing in disguise was about to save the USA’s World Cup. It was about to unleash Carli Lloyd. Up to that point in the tournament, Lloyd had been asked to play alongside Lauren Holiday in an ill-defined central midfield partnership. Neither one of them was a defensive midfielder, and neither one of them was an attacking midfielder. They were expected to split those duties between them on the fly. That not only led to gaping holes and poor positioning in the midfield, but it restrained Lloyd, who throughout her career was best as a pure attacking player who could push forward without restraint.

The national team players were in camp in Orlando, Florida, preparing for a pair of friendlies against Colombia when Rich Nichols and Jeffrey Kessler scheduled a conference call with the players on the team’s CBA committee. It was then that Hope Solo, Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Megan Rapinoe were presented with the idea of filing a wage-discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, against U.S. Soccer. If the players agreed to sign on, they would be asking a government agency to investigate whether U.S. Soccer was violating U.S. laws against workplace discrimination. In other words, the players were going to publicly accuse U.S. Soccer of discriminating against the women’s national team. It was a move guaranteed to ratchet up the tension between the national team and the federation. “I was nervous about that call the entire week because, in essence, what we were asking these great players to do was to sue their current employer for wage discrimination,” Nichols says. “That takes huge courage from anybody.