Defense Soccer Quotes

Julie Williams was determined to break my defense.

Soccer,” Bielsa said, “rests on four fundamentals, as outlined by Óscar Tabárez: (1) defense; (2) attack; (3) how you move from defense to attack; (4) how you move from attack to defense. The issue is trying to make those passages as smooth as possible.

When the next negotiation session came around on March 15, Nichols confidently pulled out a printed copy of the report and confronted U.S. Soccer’s representatives with it. U.S. Soccer responded that the jump in profitability for the women’s team was an aberration—not part of the larger pattern in the federation’s finances. “An aberration?” Nichols responded. “Aberrations don’t occur multiple years in a row. Aberrations aren’t projected. You guys have projected profitability. You projected the women to bring in more than the men.” What U.S. Soccer’s executives told him, and have maintained in the federation’s defense ever since, is that over the previous four-year cycle—which includes World Cups for both teams—the men brought in more revenue than the women. Both sides agree that is true. The gap in revenue between the national teams had historically been large—but the long-term trend showed the gap was shrinking. Since the 2015 World Cup, the gap had flipped and the women had been bringing in more money.

In defending his decision, he later said: “My veteran players told me over and over again that they felt much more comfortable with Briana and less so with Hope because Briana communicated well with the defense.” Solo was furious, and as soon as she left her meeting with Ryan, she set out to confront her teammates. Lilly didn’t want to be involved, but Solo says that Wambach didn’t flinch when asked about it, telling her: “Hope, I think Bri is the better goalkeeper.

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.

Nichols said only one player needed to sign on, but the call ended with all five of them agreeing to do it, as long as the rest of the national team wasn’t against it. “For the last several years, we had team meetings every single camp,” says Alex Morgan. “A lot of the issues with equitable pay, equal treatment, and equal opportunity for the women’s team in comparison to the men’s team surfaced and were the sticking points. We weren’t aware of the EEOC and the possibility of them coming to our defense before it was brought up by Rich Nichols and Jeffrey Kessler, but that was something that, as a team, we decided to move forward with.