US Soccer Legend Skewers Rapinoe and Teammates' Post-Game Behavior, Draws Response from Coach
Disgust flowed from American women’s soccer legend Carli Lloyd as she surveyed the debacle of the U.S. Women’s National Team after it barely emerged with a 0-0 tie in Tuesday’s Women’s World Cup match against Portugal, only to have the team’s coach call her criticisms “insane.”
Although a second-place group finish in New Zealand with one win and two draws allows the U.S. team to advance to the next round against Sweden, Lloyd, now an analyst on Fox Sports, said player behavior that included dancing and selfies with fans revolted her.
“I’ve never witnessed something like that,” she said in a post-game discussion on the Fox set.
“There’s a difference between being respectful of the fans, and saying hello to your family but to be dancing, to be smiling.
“I mean the player of the match was that post,” she said, referring to a shot from Portugal’s Ana Capeta that hit the goal post near the end of the match — a shot that could have meant defeat for the Americans.
“We’re lucky to not be going home right now,” she said.
“There’s a difference between being respectful of the fans and saying hello to your family, but to be dancing and smiling…”@CarliLloyd on the USWNT after the match 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/38zm1eC76r
— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) August 1, 2023
“I’m all for positivity — they have advanced out of the group,” said Lloyd, a member of the U.S. World Cup champion teams in 2015 and 2019, according to The Washington Post.
“But at the same time the cheering, the dancing — I’ve got a problem with that because I wouldn’t be happy. I know several of their players, former players, ’99ers [champions] — they wouldn’t be happy with that tie. It hasn’t been good overall in these first three games. I understand the players doing interviews, I was in that position before. You don’t want to speak negatively, you don’t want to actually say what is going on, I understand that. But it’s the body language, it’s the facial expressions I’m seeing where I really don’t know if they’re upset with how they played and the results,” she said.
“Portugal played to win, and they almost did,” Lloyd noted.
She said the U.S. team’s attitude “started to shift post-2020.” (30 seconds.)
“I just think there’s a lot of off-the-field things that are happening,” she said.
She did not offer details or mention players.
However, the players for the U.S. Women’s National Team under the leadership of the spotlight-seeking Megan Rapinoe, who is competing in her final World Cup, have become increasingly politicized since 2020.
Carli Lloyd sounds off on the USWNT following a disappointing draw vs. Portugal 👀
🎥 @FOXSoccer pic.twitter.com/P7zFiAfYsb
— The Sporting News (@sportingnews) August 1, 2023
“You never want to take anything for granted. You put on that jersey and you want to give it everything you have, for the people who came before you, for the people who come after you. And I’m just not seeing that passion. I’m just seeing a lackluster, uninspiring, taking it for granted, where winning and training and doing all that you can to be the best possible individual player is not happening,” Lloyd said.
“I think, before the game, we saw the dancing. There’s a difference between confidence and arrogance, and think that’s a fine line of where is the direction going with that. It’s OK to be confident. But you never want to cross that line into being arrogant and this is exactly what can come and bite you,” she said.
U.S. Coach Vlatko Andonovski pushed back against the criticism after the game.
“The one thing I want to say is that this team wanted to win this game more than anything else,” he said. (19 seconds)
“To question the mentality of this team, to question the willingness to win, to compete… I think it’s insane.”
USWNT Head Coach Vlatko Andonovski, when asked to respond to postgame criticisms made by @CarliLloyd and some of the @FOXSports crew https://t.co/PFn5C8cDZJ pic.twitter.com/O600CE3BW4
— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) August 1, 2023
“They’ve put everything they could in preparation for this tournament and every game that they go into, so to question the mentality of this team, to question the willingness to win, to compete, I think it’s insane,” he said.
“But I’ve never seen this team step on the field and not try hard and not compete. So, everyone is entitled to an opinion and they can say whatever they want, but I just know how this team feels. And it’s not like we played well by any means, but we owned it. We know it’s not good enough. We know we’re not happy with our performance, but it’s, you know, we qualified for the next round. We’re moving on,” he said.
Former German player Ariane Hingst, now a Fox analyst, also criticized the American team, according to the Post, saying “this is not the face of the American team I’ve known before [and] it kind of shocked me.”
Analyst Alexi Lalas, who played with the U.S. men’s team in the 1994 World Cup, called the U.S. performance “abysmal,” “rudderless” and “confused.”
“The problem is — the dancing, whatever — behind that seems to be belief that they’re going to find some other gear, that they’re going to turn that switch on and something magical is going to happen in the round of 16 to make them a better team than they actually are, and that team has been hiding throughout the group stage,” Lalas said, according to the Post.
Lloyd meanwhile compared the team to her 2015 squad — unfavorably.
“I don’t think there’s one problem that’s necessarily going on — I think there’s multiple things,” she said, according to the Post.
“That gear, that switch, doesn’t just turn on once you hit the knockout stages. You have to build momentum. We built momentum in 2015 and we also had the players that could dig deep and had that champion mentality that could dig us out of a hole and I’m not so sure this group has that now,” she said.
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