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Joined: Dec 1969
Spiny--
Watched the women's soccer game today, and the Notre Dame game on Friday.
The one thing you didn't report, and the reason for my header: late in the first half, Tierna Davidson gathered the ball under pressure, and tipped it wide toward the left of the box. Just as she tipped it, a Tar Heel,I think #47 Alex Kimball, comes sliding in. The tackle wasn't late, but she came in studs up with her foot 6 inches off the ground, and caught Tierna flush on the shin. Davidson went straight down and was lying on the ground sobbing, and I was afraid the tackle had broken her ankle. She had to be helped off the field and from the game.
The referee gave a yellow, but it was the only one he issued all day, as the game got progressively more chippy. I especially thought Madison Haley was getting hacked pretty regularly without drawing a call, much less a warning or a card.
Before that, Stanford had really been dominating the game pretty thoroughly. UNC had their best run of play as Stanford tried to recover in the opening 15 minutes or so of the second half, but the play was much more even without the best player in college anchoring our backline in her first game back from WNT duty. But a wonderful goal from Sophia Smith (a 21-yarder she launched after cutting from the left top of the box across, and curled in hitting the inside of the bottom of the far post) put Stanford up 1-0.
UNC tied it on a scramble off a free kick from about 40 yards out launched into the box, that pinballed a bit before falling onto the foot of Tar Heel Brianna Pinto, who blasted it home from about 13 yards to the left side through traffic in about the 80th minute. Both teams had half-chances late, but regulation ended in a tie.
Overtime, UNC took an early long shot that Jahansouz gathered in. Then Macario went to work. On the right side of the box, she beat one defender, cut around another, then beat the first defender again, working toward the endline about 10 yards off the post. On the endline, she held off two defenders, then hammered a ball on the ground through the inside defender's legs, finding Haley 3 yards off the front post, and Madison redirected just inside the near post over a sprawling goalie's foot.
The reason for my ire at Anson Dorrance? Goes back a long way, but his teams have always pushed the limits of physicality, and at times gone over them. His great success in the 80s and 90s was in part based on a rather ruthless approach - get big, physical players and train them to an edge in a Darwinian survival set of practices, then turn them loose on teams that were not as big, not as fast, and run them into the ground. In an era where there weren't that many players whose skills could overcome physicality, it worked really well.
My particular start on that story was a game against them in Moraga in 2002. Stanford had one player, Alisan Pabon, who was torching the Tar Heels from her right back position early in the match, and she was the one player who was a clear advantage to Stanford on the field. On 3 different possessions within 5 minutes, Tar Heels players lofted long balls into Pabon's corner, and, as she went to collect them, or shepherd them out of bounds over the touch or end lines, went clattering into her from behind hard, drawing a couple of fouls. But also taking Pabon's legs out from under her; she wasn't the same threatening player for the rest of the match.
Did Dorrance call for that play? Probably not. But did the mindset he instilled in his team lead to it, or to today's sliding through Davidson studs up? It certainly didn't stop it, that's for certain.
Dorrance raised the level of women's soccer in the U.S., and won resources for the game through his team's success that have enabled its development. But I also think that style is where especially the women's national team is stuck. You can be successful as a team early in your development by being faster and more physical than the other side, and it's difficult for a player to develop technically when winning games up and down the age groups are what gets coaches paid. So we get a national side of fast, physical, and occasionally technically well-trained players, which wins us CONCACAF. But as the rest of the world starts to catch up in women's sports, soccer especially, that will not be enough. We're already seeing more technically proficient sides beat the U.S. in age-group competitions, and we've seen it start to take hold at the full national level - France, Japan, and other teams are at least equally technically to the U.S. at this point, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the U.S. knocked out in the WWC next year in the semis or earlier.
Sorry if this is a bit one-sided, but watching that tackle (and the announcers' lack of reaction to a studs up high boot against one of the best players in the country) got me a bit... incensed.
VG
