Hello, hello everybody and welcome to the total soccer show. My name is Taylor Rockwell, and on today's episode, we're going to be previewing the 2021 She Believes Cup, not the 2020, she believes Cup. It starts Thursday with Brazil, Argentina, in the afternoon, followed by USA Canada at 7 p.m. Here to do, I'm going to be honest, most slash all of the heavylifting

when it comes to previewing this is Meredith Cash of Business Insider. Meredith, thanks so much for being here.

Hello, thank you for having me. Yeah, I appreciate you taking time away from covering every single

sport simultaneously. Is that about your schedule right now? Yeah, just all at once.

Just throw them all at me and I'll just try and juggle and not fall down. That's sort of the

game plan here. So we've got tennis. We've got WNBA Free Agency. I think you mentioned before we started

recording. But we're going to talk She Believes, which is a slightly strange She Believes Cup, given some teams were in, then they had to leave, some teams added.

So for people who've missed it, who are just catching up, what sort of was the story with this tournament and the teams competing?

Yeah, so it was a stacked group of teams competing from the jump, and, you know, obviously the U.S. hosts.

And then you've got Brazil, you've got Canada, and then Japan was supposed to round out that list.

But given the pandemic and all of the complications there, shortly, I guess a few weeks out, but close

enough to make the Federation sweat a little bit. Japan backed out with, I think, some semblance

of warning, but, you know, a team dropping out is still kind of nerve-wracking for for any hosts but um yeah

japan uh jumped out and to to the federation's credit they were they were pretty quick to get

Argentina to replace them and what is the latest in terms of the Olympics to go along with this? Because in my mind,

she believes he's always sort of a good way to see where everybody's at, to see what's kind of

working as a sort of warm up, tune up sort of thing for the Olympics. There was reporting that

they weren't going to be happening. The IOC and the Japanese government came out and said they're

definitely happening. So it seems like full speed ahead, but I wanted to make sure that that was

the case. Yeah, as far as I know, and as far as the athletes know, from my understanding, they're

still on. Everyone's still preparing as if they're on. You know, it remains to be seen what the

limitations are in terms of fans, in terms of whether or not athletes are vaccinated, what their accommodations are like, whether or not they have to quarantine before they're competing.

...