As the U.S. women’s national team waits to face Portugal to finish up their group stage of the Women’s World Cup on Tuesday night in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, two days out from the match, forward Megan Rapinoe said in a news conference she’s excited for the games ahead. Even if she didn’t quite know the math that would get the USWNT through to the knockout stage.
The match against Portugal is now “a must perform, must win,” she said. That’s not a new scenario for this squad.
“It’s a pressure moment, and that’s what the tournament is,” Rapinoe said. “Now every single game from here on out is that pressure moment. And that’s the best part of being in the World Cup.”
Rapinoe acknowledged the team knew going into their trip to New Zealand that they’d need to build into the tournament and through the matches — and because they knew it, the team isn’t spending time worrying about it. “It’s different from a lot of other years,” she said. “The whole time, we’ve had players coming back from injury, we’ve had different lineups, we’ve had players playing with a lot of different people around them and not having that consistency.”
There’s also the culture of the USWNT to fall back on, which is much larger than any one player.
“We go into these moments like, ‘Hell yeah, this is exactly where we want to be,’” she said. “You could feel it in the second half, even, of the game against the Netherlands, that’s coming, you know that it’s coming. For us, we’re excited, we’re unsatisfied with the way that we’ve played, but we know the areas that we can be better and I think there are some really simple fixes that we can do to put ourselves in a better position to have more joy on the ball, especially in the final third.”
Rapinoe had specific thoughts on just what needs to improve for the team, too, starting with better positional discipline.
“Speed is one of our greatest strengths, but everybody knows that we’re fast,” she said, calling for the players on the field to be a bit cagier with their movement, and to take advantage of the team’s strength via width. “We got quite narrow versus the Netherlands, and it enabled them even when they got tired towards the end of the game to get players around the ball and stop our creative flow quite a bit.”
Rapinoe also acknowledged some questions on the lack of substitutes against the Netherlands, saying that decision always ultimately lies with coach Vlatko Andonovski and he’s always aware every single player on the bench thinks they should go into a match when they’re not on the field.
“I think I could have helped, but I think Lynn (Williams) could have helped and I think Trinity (Rodman) was helping and I think Soph (Smith) was helping,” she said, stressing that the players on the field were creating chances until the final whistle. “It wasn’t like the players on the field didn’t do their job.”
Rapinoe’s also in the particular headspace of this being her final World Cup, some of her final games before she retires at the end of this season. There are moments of reflection for her, but as she said, “I’m trying to stay as present as much as possible, because I just want to f—ing win, too.”
Rapinoe, who has an answer for every question, was finally stumped by one Sunday. “No team can win forever,” Rachel Bachman of the Wall Street Journal said. “If this team doesn’t win it all, how should it be judged?”
Rapinoe paused for a long moment. “I never thought about that.”
She might not ever have to ponder that one before she retires, but first, the USWNT has to meet another pressure moment Tuesday night at Eden Park.
(Photo: Georgia Soares / The Athletic)
