CARSON — Maybe instead of exporting all of our top Mexican-American talent, we should be recruiting it? I mean, if we want to have any hope of catching the world.
We as in us, as in the U.S., as in the USWNT, the G.O.A.T. when it comes to women’s soccer programs. You know the credentials: Four World Cup championships, four Olympic golds, nine CONCACAF Gold Cups, the longest continuous No. 1 ranking in history, atop the mountain from 2008 to 2014. A 71-match home unbeaten streak at one point.
And so, sure, I can hear echoes of the familiar refrain now, that baked-in assumption: If a girl is good enough to be on the U.S. National team, she’ll be on it … because it’s a hard team to make.
For a long time, it was tough to argue. Hard to quibble with who might not have been included on such an exclusive roster when those teams were having so much success. There’s just so much talent in America, even if potentially promising players from Idaho and and Texas, Torrance and Moreno Valley started to matriculate south, it was easy to suggest they just weren’t good enough, those girls.
But could they be? Would they be?
Sí se puede.
Of course, it would’ve taken some foresight about what might happen when the rest of the soccer-mad world started to take women’s soccer seriously. To imagine how quickly everyone would start making up the ground Title IX staked us.
They’ve done more than close the gap, they’ve created one: I just witnessed a Mexican team that came into this CONCACAF W Gold Cup with 10 American-born players on its 23-woman roster leave the U.S. – a team with no Latinas on its current squad, by the way – in its wake Monday night at Dignity Health Sports Park.
Watched them outclass us. Out-think us. Outpace us. Outplay us. The final damage: 2-0, a sublime, poetic entry by the women into the longstanding “Dos a Cero” rivalry between the U.S. and Mexican men’s teams.
¡Un GO-LA-ZO de Pelayo sella el paso a los Cuartos de Final…
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