Carli Lloyd said the biggest takeaway from the scintillating bronze-medal-winning performance of USA in their 4-3 defeat of Australia was that you “don’t win championships without the winning mentality”.
The USA team had laboured to a semi-final against Canada in which they endured a bruising 1-0 defeat and Lloyd reflected on the impact of the drive shown in their final game. She and her fellow veteran Megan Rapinoe each scored twice – one of Rapinoe’s goals came direct from a corner – and said they were undecided on their international futures.
“Hopefully everyone on this squad and people watching and people that have been in the [talent] pool remember that we don’t win championships without the US mentality,” Lloyd said. “We need to continue to bring that each and every game, each and every day [and] training session. We need to push one another because that ultimately is our secret weapon going into every tournament.”
After the defeat against Canada Rapinoe had said the players had struggled to play with joy. “Football always needs joy,” she said. Perhaps it was the idea of the tournament favourites going home empty-handed that spurred them to find their missing joy on the patchwork-quilted turf of the Kashima Stadium, or perhaps it was that the game could prove to be the swansong of the 36-year-old Rapinoe, the 39-year-old Lloyd and/or the 36-year-old defender Becky Sauerbrunn.
“Oh my gosh, I mean so much more [joy],” a relieved Rapinoe said after securing bronze. “We’ve done, as you can imagine, lots of talking in meetings and hashing it all out and doing the autopsy. I feel like we just got to a good place.” She said the players had decided “we might as well just be a little bit more free, trust in ourselves, trust in each other”.
There are few players you would expect to grab a second career Olympic goal direct from a corner (known, fittingly, as an Olimpico) but few players rise to challenges like Rapinoe on the biggest stages.
If there had been questions asked of USA’s ageing starting XI, with five players born in the 1980s compared with one for Australia (Clare Polkinghorne, born in 1989), they were quickly put to bed by the veterans who had unfairly borne the brunt of criticism for the team’s tournament sluggishness.
Australia’s manager, Tony Gustavsson, had been asked before the match how much they would miss the suspended 21-year-old Lyon full-back Ellie Carpenter. “You know that the US tried to get behind us a lot [in the group stage] and lacking one of the fastest players in the world in the backline is obviously going to have an impact,” he said.
Rapinoe appeared to have absorbed the message and was able to delight in the space left in the absence of the dynamic Carpenter, with Polkinghorne not up to the task of filling in.
The former Manchester United forward Christen Press provided the impetus that rattled the Australia backline. First, Press forced the save that brought the corner from which Rapinoe opened the scoring. Then, sandwiching a goal from the Chelsea forward Sam Kerr, Press popped the ball into the box and forced a mix-up between Polkinghorne and Alanna Kennedy, with Rapinoe volleying the stray ball in. Lloyd scored her first on the stroke of half-time and Press forced a mistake from Kennedy for Lloyd’s second before Caitlin Foord made it 4-2.
Gustavsson had praised Australia’s “never-say-die” spirit and late on Kerr hit the post and the substitute Emily Gielnik lashed in from distance to reduce the deficit to one goal.
“I said in the huddle that I actually hope we never forget the feeling we felt after this loss,” Gustavsson said. “That is a feeling we never want to feel again and we need to use that as fuel to make sure we work really hard from now on to get better. Come that World Cup 2023 [in Australia and New Zealand] we want to have the feeling that we had when we played GB in the stadium, that excitement and celebration to win.”
He added, though: “There’s also a feeling of pride. I’m extremely proud of these girls and the way that they fought.”
The USA manager, Vlatko Andonovski, said he would take time to assess his own performance at a first major tournament. “I’m certainly going to do a deep dive into my performance and evaluate and analyse what it is I could have done better,” he said. “I’m sure there are a lot of things. There’s no one thing I can think of right now, but I know there’s things I could have done better and hopefully I don’t make the same mistakes in the next major tournament.”