The fading invincibility of U.S. women’s soccer
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2023
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The USWNT is out of the World Cup at the earliest stage in the program’s history. Today on “Post Reports,” we talk to soccer reporter Steve Goff about what happened – and what it signals about the global evolution of women's soccer.
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The U.S. women’s national soccer team went into the World Cup favored to win it all. Instead, they were knocked out before even making it to the quarterfinals.
But as The Post’s Emily Giambalvo wrote, “the team’s waning dominance says less about the United States and more about the global evolution of women’s soccer.”
Soccer reporter Steve Goff spoke to us from Melbourne, Australia, about the dramatic early exit for the USWNT – and what he’s watching for next in this World Cup.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sunday morning, I woke up early to catch the U.S. women's national soccer team playing |
| 0:08.3 | Sweden in the World Cup. |
| 0:09.9 | If those last few minutes of the game are still a painful memory for you too, you might just |
| 0:14.6 | want to skip ahead. |
| 0:16.3 | But in case you didn't watch and you want to know what happened, here's a quick recap. |
| 0:20.7 | You know, the U.S. played well. |
| 0:22.6 | In all honesty, they played so much better than they did in the group stage, but they couldn't |
| 0:28.5 | score. |
| 0:29.5 | Steve Goff covers soccer for the post and he's been in Australia, New Zealand covering |
| 0:34.1 | the World Cup. |
| 0:35.3 | So he saw this brutal game up close. |
| 0:38.4 | The goalkeeper for Sweden was phenomenal. |
| 0:42.1 | U.S. had chance after chance after chance, denied. |
| 0:46.6 | Game went through 90 minutes of regulation. |
| 0:49.2 | It went through 30 minutes of extra time. |
| 0:52.9 | And then it went on to the panel to kick shoot out. |
| 0:56.0 | People say baseball is a game of inches. |
| 0:58.7 | Once out soccer is a game of millimeters. |
| 1:02.3 | And so the U.S. was in position to win it and then it came down to Sweden scoring on their |
| 1:08.9 | seventh attempt. |
| 1:09.9 | I'll listen there. |
| 1:10.9 | The U.S. goalkeeper made the initial save, but the ball was still alive. |
... |
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