With the game goalless at Wembley on 86 minutes, United States full-back Emily Fox waltzed into the England penalty area. It was then that Emma Hayes was confronted with an alarming realization.
“I look, and there’s no one in the box,” USWNT manager Hayes said of that sequence of play in Saturday’s 0-0 friendly with England. “Our mentality has to be better than that. That’s what I will be demanding from the team.”
The sight of Fox’s tempting cross fizzing across the goal only to be scooped up benignly by goalkeeper Mary Earps told a story; which is that, for the second time in Hayes’ brief tenure, her side had failed to score in a match.
Not that this is a horror story. The world’s top-ranked team do not have a goalscoring problem. In their three previous friendlies — last month against Iceland (a double-header) and Argentina — the team scored three goals in each, totting up an aggregate score of 9-2. In the 13 matches Hayes presided over before facing England, the USWNT scored 28 times, a healthy average of just over twice a game.
But, the key question heading into an away meeting with the European champions and No.2-ranked team in the world was: how would the new Olympic champions fare without the self-ascribed “Triple Espresso” of Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman and Mal Swanson.
Hayes’ goal-plundering trio have been left out of the November camp to recover from minor injuries after the recent culmination of the NWSL season. While in their absence the USWNT’s attack was less defined, it did present the manager with another opportunity to audition others as she continues her post-Paris 2024 evolution.
The last time Rodman, Smith and Swanson started a match together was that Olympic final against Brazil in early August. In the three succeeding friendlies, Hayes named three different front lines with varying degrees of experience. In the Iceland games, Hayes fielded front threes with combined caps total of more than 100, while against Argentina that figure dropped to 49.
Sarina Wingman’s England, however, posed a more exacting test. And as Hayes named a different front three in her starting XI for the fourth match in a row — this time, it was Alyssa Thompson, Lynn Williams and Emma Sears — the disjointed chemistry and inexperience of Thompson (12th cap) and Sears (third), alongside 31-year-old Williams (74th), was pronounced.
Despite registering 40 touches in the box (to England’s 14) and edging possession (54 per cent to 46), the visitors struggled to convert their dominance into goals. Of the USWNT’s 10 shots at goal, only three were on target, all in the first half and from around the edge of the penalty area. Earps deserves praise for producing two diving saves to deny Thompson and Casey Krueger, but too often the final pass by the Americans was for want, leaving a slick passage of play spluttering in anti-climax.
While neither Williams nor Thompson registered a shot on target and had only a single attempt at goal each despite playing for the full 90 minutes, a poor midfield performance from Lindsey Horan had a major impact on the attack. Yazmeen Ryan produced a confident second-half performance after replacing Sears at half-time and showed promise in her interplay with Fox and Rose Lavelle. Yet, she too failed to register a single shot.
Caveats are required.
Barring Williams, none of Hayes’ attacking options had more than 20 caps coming into this camp, and none are above the age of 25. Counterpart Wiegman matched Hayes’ youthful but raw forward line by naming a back line of veterans: 33-year-old Lucy Bronze (127 England caps), 27-year-old Leah Williamson (51 caps); 31-year-old Alex Greenwood (96 caps) and 27-year-old Jess Carter (38 caps). Breaking through such a defence would have required a wit and fluency the USWNT lacked on the night.
“I’d expect Bronze and Greenwood to have dominant tactical moments, because when you face those experienced players and they want to go one-v-one with you, you’ve got to position yourself properly,” Hayes said. “The decision-making and execution in the final third, that comes with connections. Trin, Mal, Soph, they’re used to them. Lynn, Emma and Alyssa have never played together before. Alyssa and Emma have got work to do after so few caps.”
The experience of playing at Wembley for developing attacking players such as Thompson, Sears, Ryan, Jaedyn Shaw and the latter’s fellow 20-year-old Ally Sentnor, who made her debut in the match’s final minutes, is priceless. Equally advantageous is the opportunity to develop various relationships.
A pass map — provided by Stats Perform which depicts the “best XI” in successful passes — shows the array of passing lanes used (Ryan’s 13 completed passes out of 16 in the second half beat Sears’ six of seven in the first half). The variety suggests a performance building towards better and more dynamic partnerships across the pitch, particularly when compared to the Olympic final four months ago.
A pass map of the USWNT’s performance against Brazil in the 2024 Olympic gold-medal match: (1-Alyssa Naeher; 2-Emily Fox, 3-Korbin Albert, 4-Naomi Girma, 5-Trinity Rodman, 7-Crystal Dunn, 9-Mallory Swanson, 10-Lindsey Horan (Capt.), 11-Sophia Smith, 12-Tierna Davidson, 17-Sam Coffey)
A pass map of the USWNT’s performance against England in Saturday’s friendly: (1-Naeher; 4-Girma; 6-Lynn Williams; 7-Alyssa Thompson; 10-Horan (Capt.); 13-Emma Sears; 14-Emily Sonnett; 16-Rose Lavelle; 17-Coffey; 20-Casey Krueger; 23-Fox).
“I’m pleased with the progress, the football we’re playing,” said Hayes. “That, for me, is the most pleasing part, but I’m disappointed we didn’t win. I thought we were the better team.”
The only other time the USWNT failed to score under Hayes was a goalless pre-Olympic friendly against Costa Rica in July, when a front three of Swanson, Rodman and Smith was deployed for just the second time since her appointment. Six matches and an Olympic gold medal each later, the trio had established themselves as an international nightmare for defences, getting 10 of the team’s 12 goals at the Games between them as the U.S. outscored every other competing nation.
The takeaway is that seemingly being able to breathe the same pockets of attacking air requires time and space.
Saturday’s contest felt like it was attempting to say something behind its hand, mouthing surreptitiously as both teams kept hidden their full caches of aces, attempting to suss out if they have more to play in the future.
Hayes knows she has those three aces up her sleeve.
For now, she is maximising the time and space afforded between major tournaments to season more of them and tease out an algorithm that will allow her to utilise those players, too.
“We know we have to clean things up in the final third,” Lavelle told reporters after the match. “We did well getting there and got some good opportunities, but then didn’t have that final piece. That’s the thing that we have to work on going forward.”
(Top photo: Chloe Knott – Danehouse/Getty Images)
