The criticism in the direction of the U.S. girls’s soccer staff hasn’t died down within the slightest, not less than not from these at Fox Sports who’re nonetheless overlaying the Women’s World Cup.
When the on-location panel was requested in regards to the subsequent steps for this system after the staff’s loss to Sweden within the Round of 16, soccer analyst and former staff captain Carli Lloyd continued in her blunt appraisal.
While in a roundabout way mentioning anybody by identify, Lloyd joined the refrain of people that say that U.S. Soccer wants to maneuver on from Vlatko Andonovski, whose techniques got here into query lengthy earlier than the staff was despatched dwelling.
“They have to take their time, but they also need to quickly figure out what to do with the Olympics looming,” mentioned Lloyd. “Players shouldn’t be involved with this. In the past, players have been involved. I think someone needs to come in, they need to be ruthless, they need to make tough decisions.”
She ended her ideas by saying a somewhat damning line in regards to the staff’s tradition.
“This is a very, very important decision and a coach should not be friends with the players,” Lloyd mentioned.
There’s an fascinating line of thought that pervades sports activities when a largely profitable staff falls in need of expectations. It’s by no means {that a} coach is simply too powerful on the gamers however that she or he have been too lenient. Whether that is true or not is not a query that these outdoors of the USWNT can reply, however there isn’t any doubt that accidents to key gamers and a few questionable methods doomed the staff even earlier than arriving in Australia and New Zealand for the event.
Lloyd, who has turn into a lightning rod for her criticism of the staff in the course of the World Cup, was not the one one who saved harping on staff tradition. Cue Alexi Lalas, the longtime analyst and former member of the lads’s staff.
“Whoever comes in, they need to clean house,” he mentioned, occurring to say that perhaps not an entire makeover is required however not less than one when it comes to its management. In addressing veteran gamers like Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, Lalas alluded to the necessity for a youth motion by saying “They need to get rid of some of these players that have been around.”
Those feedback will not be as controversial as his post about how sure parts of America dislike the staff for political causes, however they nonetheless converse to a perception that the tradition, and never Sweden’s high quality play or the development of girls’s soccer world wide, led to the early exit.
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