Scott Jenkins

I am a huge soccer fan and this morning was rough to watch the U.S. Women’s Soccer team lose its semifinal match to Brazil. The U.S. had a 51 game unbeaten streak coming in and was ranked #1 in the world. Granted when you lose 4-0 and the other team controls the ball for 67% of the time and takes 18 shots and you have to play the whole second half a person down due to an ejection there are many reasons for the loss. With all that said I blame our coach Greg Ryan for benching our starting goalie, Hope Solo, for this game. You don’t take out one of the players that got you there.

His argument was that Briana Scurry had more experience and was 12-0 alltime against Brazil. Those facts are true and yes Briana was one of the heroes of the 1999 World Cup but this was a bad decision. For one thing she had not played this whole World Cup yet and to take Hope out who had shutout every opponent since the opening game just messes up the flow of the team. Plus one reason Briana was 12-0 coming in against Brazil is that for a lot of those games she had the likes of Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Brandi Chastain which are all retired so that stat is a little misleading.

I’m not saying that the U.S. would have won with Hope in the goal but she is one of the stars of this team and part of the future of U.S. Soccer and she had earned the right to be in there.

So the final will be Brazil vs. Germany and the U.S. will have to wait till the 2008 Olympics to regain its rightful place as the #1 ranked women’s soccer team in the world. I just hope in the Olympics that they play with Hope.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.