The National Team Page 14

  That struck her as unusual, and she immediately had a bad feeling about it. Through the group stage and the quarterfinal, the national team was unbeaten, and Solo was getting better with every game.

  She did open the tournament with a mistake—a wet ball slipped through her hands and into the back of the net, forcing a 2–2 draw with North Korea in the opening match. But it was a strange game—North Korea’s two goals came during the 10 minutes striker Abby Wambach spent on the sideline getting 11 stitches on her scalp after a collision and Ryan opted not to sub her out—a risky decision. Solo followed up that draw with three consecutive shutouts, all wins, against Sweden, Nigeria, and England.

  When Solo went up to her coach’s room to talk with him, she found out she was right to be worried. Ryan was going to start Briana Scurry in goal for the semifinal instead of Solo.

  “Bri has a winning record against Brazil,” he told her. “Her style just matches up better with Brazil’s style.”

  Scurry had been a fantastic goalkeeper for the national team, to be sure, and some of her best performances had indeed come against Brazil. In 12 career matches versus Brazil, Scurry averaged just .41 goals conceded per game. Only three months earlier, Scurry recorded a shutout versus Brazil in a friendly when Solo was away dealing with the death of her father.

  The problem, however, was that friendly versus Brazil in June was the last time Scurry started for the national team. By now it was September and in the middle of the knockout round of a World Cup. There was no way Scurry could be at her sharpest. If Ryan’s decision wasn’t fair to Solo, who had done nothing to lose her spot, it really wasn’t fair to Scurry, who didn’t have the proper preparation to perform at her best.

  The decision—as stunning as it was—was bad enough. But making it worse was that Ryan admitted he made it with input from Abby Wambach and Kristine Lilly.

  In defending his decision, he later said: “My veteran players told me over and over again that they felt much more comfortable with Briana and less so with Hope because Briana communicated well with the defense.”

  Solo was furious, and as soon as she left her meeting with Ryan, she set out to confront her teammates. Lilly didn’t want to be involved, but Solo says that Wambach didn’t flinch when asked about it, telling her: “Hope, I think Bri is the better goalkeeper.”

  When Solo got back to her own hotel room, all her emotions were unleashed. As one player puts it now: “All the sudden, we were seeing furniture fly into the hallway.” Several players who decline to speak on the record say Solo trashed her room and punched a hole in the wall. Nicole Barnhart, the backup goalkeeper who was her roommate at the time, picked up the furniture and put the room back together.

  Later, Aly Wagner, Cat Whitehill, and Angela Hucles went to Solo’s room to check on her. She was crying.

  The trio understood why Solo was so upset. The decision to change a goalkeeper in the middle of a World Cup was unprecedented, and everyone knew it. The players tried to support her and give her a pep talk to be ready, just in case.

  “We get it,” the players told her one by one. “This is an awful thing to go through. We’ve all been there. But you are still part of this team, and we still need you. You never know what’s going to happen in the game.”

  The press corps in China was small, but once reporters there learned about Ryan’s decision, it was all they could ask about.

  Would it shake Solo’s confidence?

  “That’s not our concern,” Ryan said. “We came here trying to win a world championship and put the players on the field that we thought could win each game.”

  Was Ryan concerned that Scurry would be rusty?

  “She’ll be ready—wait and see,” he said.

  Julie Foudy and Tony DiCicco were now both working as broadcast analysts for ESPN. On air, they expressed astonishment at Ryan’s decision and both said, in no uncertain terms, that it was a bad move.

  “If there isn’t a goalkeeper controversy, why make one?” DiCicco asked rhetorically. “It’s not just those two players—every player is affected.”

  * * *

  Once the semifinal versus Brazil began, the national team looked to be in trouble immediately, struggling from the first whistle.

  In the seventh minute, Scurry got her first test. She reached out to pluck a floating free kick out of the air, but the ball slipped through her hands. A Brazilian player shot the loose ball, but it went over the bar.

  Julie Foudy, who was ESPN’s color commentator, told play-by-play announcer JP Dellacamera on the live broadcast: “This is precisely what we’ve been talking about. Briana Scurry has only started in seven games since 2005. The problem with that is you just aren’t in a rhythm—you aren’t used to handling balls with pressure like that.”

  But the first goal the Americans conceded would come on a mis-communication and an own goal. On a Brazil corner kick, Formiga played a relatively harmless ball into the box. There wasn’t a yellow shirt nearby, and the Americans had it covered. Scurry called out, “Mine!” but Leslie Osborne dived to head the ball clear and accidentally headed it straight into the net.

  By the 28th minute, the Brazilians were firmly in control. The world’s best player, Marta, was doing what she does best as she danced her way through the box and fired off a low, skipping shot. Scurry read the ball and got a palm on it—but it wasn’t strong enough. The ball flicked past her hand and skipped in. It was 2–0. The Americans looked frazzled. At this moment, for the first time in 51 games under Greg Ryan, the Americans trailed by more than one goal.

  As if things weren’t going poorly enough, Shannon Boxx earned her second yellow card of the night and was thus red-carded out of the game. Her first yellow was deserved, but the second one was a shockingly inept referee decision.

  Video replays show the center referee did not even see what happened. Replays also show it was Cristiane who clipped Boxx, not the other way around. It was a terrible call and, just like that, any hopes for an American comeback were all but dashed. Boxx watched the rest of the game through tears from the locker room while the U.S. continued, down a player.

  When halftime arrived, Boxx was no longer the only player sitting in the locker room in tears.

  “The team had already given up,” says Cat Whitehill, who scored 11 goals over her national team career, despite being a defender. “Players were already crying. We had been down before, but I had never seen that. When I saw everyone in the locker room, I thought: We don’t have a chance.”

  In the second half, the Brazilians started toying with the Americans. Marta would let the ball sit in front of her and, as a U.S. defender stood at the ready, trying to anticipate the next move, Marta would feign her hips one way and then the other. She’d go back and forth, like a Brazilian samba dance. She’d bring her favored left foot into the dance, faking like she was about to kick the ball. Finally, she’d catch the defender flat-footed and tap the ball around her.

  “It’s fair to say that was one of our worst games in the history of the program,” says Heather O’Reilly, who started in the match. “There was an own goal, there was a red card, all in the first half, and we were just climbing this enormous mountain with 10 players for the majority of the game. As it got more challenging for us, the Brazilians grew in their momentum and their energy. They were having the time of their lives on the field, and for us it was the game from hell.”

  For whatever scrutiny Greg Ryan would face for the goalkeeper change and its effect on the back line, the American attack was struggling just as much. The front players couldn’t string anything together and played desperate, haphazard soccer.

  “It was like watching an accident happen in slow motion and there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Angela Hucles, who watched the game from the bench. “It didn’t matter how hard we were working, it just wasn’t syncing up.”

  In the end, Brazil crushed the Americans, 4–0. It became the team’s worst-ever loss in World Cup history. Briana Scurry’s
12-game winning streak versus Brazil throughout her career, including eight shutouts, had come to an end.

  Afterward, coaches and players alike walked past the mixed zone, which is the wall of reporters trying to get postgame quotes. The Brazilian players, all smiles, formed a conga line and danced through it past the American media.

  Greg Ryan, meanwhile, was asked about the goalkeeper decision.

  “I don’t have any regrets about that,” he said. “I think Bri played a great game. The first goal that Marta scored was a great goal. Briana in that situation gives us the best chance to stop that shot because of her quickness and speed. If you look at the rest of the match, there is nothing she could have done about any of the other goals.”

  A reporter from Canada’s CBC asked Solo if she wanted to comment. Aaron Heifetz, the team’s longtime press officer, intervened: “She didn’t play. You only want to talk to players who played in the game.” Solo heard this, spun around on her heels, and snapped, “No, I want to talk!” She gave CBC reporter Erin Paul a blunt, honest assessment of her feelings:

  It was the wrong decision, and I think anyone who knows anything about the game knows that. There’s no doubt in my mind I would have made those saves. And the fact of the matter is it’s not 2004 anymore. It’s not 2004. It’s now 2007 and you have to live in the present and you can’t live by big names. You can’t live in the past. It doesn’t matter what somebody did in an Olympic gold-medal game three years ago. Now is what matters, and that’s what I think.

  The CBC had a content-sharing agreement with ESPN, and the video of Solo was quickly all over the channel and the network’s website, where Solo’s teammates would eventually watch the clip over and over.

  Back at the hotel, the turmoil was only getting started. The Americans and the Brazilians, who were staying at the same hotel, ran into each other in the lobby. The Americans cried as the Brazilians danced.

  “That was one of the most excruciating postgame hotel moments I can remember,” Heather O’Reilly says. “We were with family and friends, sobbing, and they’re trying to console us, and the Brazilians show up and are just relentless in their celebrations. I’ll confidently use the word obnoxious, because it was. It was pretty over-the-top and absurd. I remember them in the turnstile of the door, just going around and around.”

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for Solo to get a phone call in her hotel room from Kristine Lilly, the captain of the team. Lilly and some of the veterans had seen her post-game interview and wanted to talk to her.

  As described in Solo’s book, when she walked into Lilly’s room, there was also Briana Scurry, Abby Wambach, Christie Pearce, Shannon Boxx, and Kate Markgraf. They felt she had broken an unwritten rule.

  Wambach would later explain it in her own book, Forward, like this: “There’s an unspoken code in our sport, with a few key tenets: you don’t talk shit about your teammates, you don’t throw anyone under the bus, and you don’t publicly promote yourself at the expense of the team.”

  One by one, the players expressed their anger and disappointment. They said Solo had torn down what the players before her—players like Julie Foudy and Mia Hamm—had built up. This team had a vitally important culture that Solo was destroying.

  Solo argued: “This isn’t about Julie Foudy or anyone else from the past.” But her pushback only seemed to further upset the veterans.

  “I didn’t know to handle this betrayal of the team culture,” Markgraf says now. “I was tired, I was hurt, I had blown my ankle out after a poor World Cup. We played horrible soccer. And she blasted Bri, who had handled the transition of power at goalkeeper in a very classy way, so when she did that, it became a mess. I wish I had kept my cool, but her actions were the telling sign that the old culture would no longer work.”

  For the rest of the players outside that leadership group, the situation was viewed with a range of attitudes, but everyone knew it was something that needed to be dealt with. The problem was that there wasn’t a consensus on what to do.

  “Some people were very upset, some people were moderately upset, and some people were indifferent,” says Angela Hucles, “but the general sense was that we need to solve this quickly because if it festers it’s going to hurt the team. It was a bit urgent.”

  The next morning, the team had a players-only meeting. The goal was to get everything out in the open. Players could express what they were feeling, and Solo could say whatever she needed to clear the air, too. There was hope for a moment of reconciliation, but it never came. Solo was asked to leave the room while the team discussed how to proceed. The meeting lasted hours and, in the end, the players didn’t get the contrition they wanted from Solo.

  The net result was that Solo was essentially kicked off the team. She was banned from practicing with the team before the third-place match against Norway, and Ryan informed her she would not be named to the roster for the game.

  Ryan told reporters he sought input from veteran players before taking such drastic steps.

  “Obviously, this has been a distraction to the team,” Ryan said. “We have moved forward with 20 players who have stood by each other.”

  Solo was shunned by most of her teammates. She was shut out of team meals, barred from the team’s final match of the World Cup, and not welcomed to the medal ceremony to collect the bronzes the team won. Afterward, she had to take a separate shuttle bus to the airport. The veterans were furious, and players who may have felt differently didn’t want to go against the team leaders.

  “I have felt compelled to clear the air regarding many of my post-game comments on Thursday night,” Solo wrote on her MySpace page. “I am not proud or happy the way things have come out. Although I stand strong in everything I said, the true disheartening moment for me was realizing it could look as though I was taking a direct shot at my own teammate. I would never throw such a low blow. Never. Many of this goes way beyond anyone’s understanding, and is simply hard to justify. In my eyes there is no justification to put down a teammate. That is not what I was doing.”

  Her apology did little to quell the controversy, which represented the first fracture in the tight-knit national team that the public had ever seen. Columnists and bloggers openly mocked Solo for saying the situation was beyond the public’s comprehension.

  But there was more to the situation than fans and media knew at the time. The fact that Solo’s father had died three months earlier of a heart attack wasn’t widely known. A couple of months before that, Solo’s longtime best friend had been struck and killed by a car while jogging. Even before she was benched in the most important game of her life and watched her World Cup dreams slip away, Hope Solo’s world was already in turmoil. Some players say they had noticed how those recent tragedies affected her.

  There were no excuses, though. Just about everyone seemed to think that what Solo said had crossed a line. Except one very important person who didn’t: Sunil Gulati, the new president of U.S. Soccer, who had taken over for Robert Contiguglia in March 2006. Gulati met with Solo in China and told her that if this situation had happened on a men’s team, it wouldn’t have blown up the way it did.

  Ryan defended his decision to bench Solo to U.S. Soccer, telling officials she had missed curfew and a team dinner the night before the team’s quarterfinal match. Meanwhile, the team had to embark on a short “victory tour” of three games for coming in third place at the World Cup. Ryan didn’t want Solo to be there, but the federation did. She attended the games but wore street clothes because Ryan wouldn’t let her play.

  After the last game in Albuquerque, Greg Ryan was fired. No coach could lose a World Cup in such chaotic fashion and remain in charge of the U.S. women’s national team. He left the job with just one loss on his record, the fewest of any non-interim head coach to hold the job.

  The qualifying tournament for the 2008 Olympics was less than four months away, and the national team was a mess. Not only did the team not have a coach, but the No. 1 goalkeep
er was in exile. U.S. Soccer would need to move swiftly to fix both problems.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Whoa, Can We Do This Without Her?”

  Pia Sundhage was at the top of the list of candidates to take over as coach of the national team. But she had actually interviewed for the job once before, and had been passed over, when the federation sought to replace April Heinrichs in 2005.

  Sundhage, who had done scouting work for Heinrichs, had been invited as one of seven candidates for the job. She’d felt honored to be granted an interview, but she wasn’t about to lie just to get the job.

  “To be honest, I want half the job. I do not want to be technical director,” she said in her 2005 interview. “I’m not American. I don’t know the American culture well enough. I know soccer and I have some ideas how I can coach this wonderful team, but I just want half the job.”

  That’s perhaps Sundhage’s defining quality: She’s unabashedly herself and never pretends otherwise. She’s known to break out into song and celebrate goals by leaping exuberantly into the air. She was a forward for the Swedish national team before she retired in 1996 and moved into coaching. Her first head coaching job came in the WUSA with the Boston Breakers, where players recall she was direct and blunt. With natural salt-and-pepper hair, a toothy smile, and a preference for tracksuits, what you see is what you get with Sundhage.

  But her admission that she didn’t want to be the USA’s technical director had been a problem. At the time, U.S. Soccer and Robert Contiguglia were looking for the national team’s head coach to oversee the entire women’s program, including the youth pipeline into the senior national team. That was a crucial part of the role they’d created for April Heinrichs, and that’s what they wanted to continue.

  When Greg Ryan got the job over Sundhage, she joined the Chinese national team as an assistant coach. Because China never faced the Americans in the 2007 World Cup, she didn’t follow the USA’s run through the tournament at all.