r/NWSL • u/alcatholik • 4h ago
[SI] ‘Red Flag’—USWNT Legend Tobin Heath Delivers Harsh Truth on Team’s Current State
Three quotes from the article.
I don’t have my own quotes directly from the podcast. Here’s the podcast linK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3nAuhFP580
Tobin Quote:
“I actually thought Spain didn’t have a good game at all,” Heath added. “Not just that, Spain playing the high aggressive line that they played with, to me, was the biggest slap in the face to the U.S. team.
“To a [USWNT] front line of Alyssa Thompson, Sophia [Wilson] and Trinity Rodman, to play a high line in international football against those types of attacking players was, to me, so disrespectful. The fact that they still held us to not scoring was their coach saying, ‘How aggressive can we be against this U.S. team in terms of a back line and not get punished for it?’”
Tobin Quote:
“When you hear Emma speak at the press conferences and you hear the players speak after the game, it’s funny. They’re really hung up on this idea of xG and all of the chances we created,” Heath said of the USWNT’s 3.0 xG compared to Spain’s 0.68, per Hayes.
She added: “Emma says, ‘It’s all about details and execution in the final third.’ I actually don’t even think the U.S. is close to being able to talk about details and execution because I think that fundamentally, the attack is so off in what they are trying to do.”
Christen Quote:
“The biggest difference is watching the Spanish attack progress the ball up into the final third, slow their bodies down, pick their heads up ... play the right pass, the right decision and the right amount of control,” Press said. “Whereas we got a lot more chances, but every single time, you see us run full speed ahead, heads down. We’re not actually picking out the right pass, we’re not picking out the right shot, we are swinging.”
