What we learned from the USWNT’s last games before World Cup and Olympics qualifying

SANDY, Utah — The U.S. women’s soccer team finished its preparations for next month’s Concacaf World Cup and Olympic qualifying tournament late Tuesday night with a 2-0 win over Colombia at Rio Tinto Stadium.

The win finished off a sweep of the two-game set, with the first game a 3-0 U.S. victory. But they were tougher tests than the Americans have had in a while, and that’s a good thing.

Here’s a look at some takeaways from the last week and a half in the Rocky Mountains.

Perhaps the biggest question about the 23-player squad that will go from here to Mexico is this: Who besides Andi Sullivan can play at defensive midfield?

This is no knock on Sullivan, who is outstanding. She’s got the skills and engine to play lots of minutes at the position. But she shouldn’t have to play them all.

It matters that U.S. manager Vlatko Andonovski isn’t taking a second player at the position to the tournament. He brought two of them to this month’s friendlies, Sam Coffey and Jaelin Howell, but it was known from the start that they were just in for this month’s camp. They didn’t play in either Colombia game.

After Sullivan started at the No. 6 on Saturday, Lindsey Horan started there on Tuesday. Each was replaced by Kristie Mewis at halftime of their respective games. Horan and Mewis can play defense in midfield, but they aren’t true defensive midfielders, no matter how many times Andonovski has claimed they can be.

“I want to be as versatile as I can, so I’m trying,” Mewis told The Inquirer after Tuesday’s game. “I think it is good to be in a deeper position for me because I have a decent left foot and a long ball to hit [to] our forwards. So I think I could be dangerous at that position, but I obviously do think that I have a lot to learn.”

There will be many games in the Concacaf tournament when it won’t matter too much. The U.S. should easily overmatch Haiti and Jamaica in its first two group games. And with the top two teams in each group qualifying for next year’s World Cup, that might be settled by the group stage finale against host Mexico.

But after that, the experiment could be a risk.

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No position has bedeviled the U.S. program more over the years than left back. There hasn’t been a player who naturally fills the role since Meghan Klingenberg in 2016. Jill Ellis shoehorned Crystal Dunn there after moving on from Klingenberg, and got lucky that Dunn was so good (and so selfless) that she played the position better than anyone else.

Now, finally, there’s a new natural. Emily Fox has shown this month that she’s as good as the scouts hoped she’d be when she was a collegian at North Carolina. Fox was such a big-time prospect that she made her senior U.S. debut in 2018 at age 19.

The water was a bit too rough back then, but it didn’t take her long to step up when she turned pro. Fox was a NWSL Rookie of the Year finalist for Racing Louisville and is playing well again this year for club and country.

“It’s very clear that she is the starter at the left back position, and she has been improving every camp that she comes into, and we’re very happy with her,” Andonovski said. “After the Olympics, it was a no-brainer for us that [she’s] one of those players from a group of players that we had on a list that we wanted to focus on. And ever since, she’s just been getting better and better.”

Don’t worry that Fox didn’t start Tuesday night. That was about rotation and rewarding Carson Pickett for her good work in camp. It’s also notable that Pickett became the first player with a limb difference to earn a national team cap.

And one more thing: Fox’s arrival should help move Dunn back to an attacking role, which always has been her best place, when she returns from maternity leave.

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When Andonovski deployed Catarina Macario as a striker in his preferred 4-3-3 system, it opened the door for using wingers in a different way. Instead of the past tradition of wide creators feeding a central target — Megan Rapinoe, Tobin Heath, and Alex Morgan, for example — Andonovski deployed field-stretchers with shooters’ touches in Mallory Pugh and Sophia Smith.

But Macario is out with a torn ACL, so Morgan and Ashley Hatch are the strikers on the current squad. Andonovski has made it clear that Pugh and Smith remain his default starters. Do the strikers’ styles need him to adjust how his wingers play?

“With Cat, she was more involved in the buildup in terms of getting the ball and then playing in the midfielders, where Alex and Hatchy are more stretching the line and creating space for the midfielders,” Andonovski said on the eve of Tuesday’s game. “In regards to how they play and how Cat plays, obviously our wings have to adjust slightly with their positioning and their movement as well.”

That was, in so many words, a yes.

Morgan obviously knows Rapinoe and Pugh from many years playing together. But she admitted she’s still getting to know Trinity Rodman, Smith, and MidgePurce.

“They definitely all bring a little something different, but they’re all great at 1-v-1s, making space for themselves, getting in behind the back line,” Morgan said.

As with the defensive midfield issue, there will be nights next month when it doesn’t matter. But there almost surely will be nights when it does. So it will be worth watching how much playing time Rapinoe, Purce, and Rodman — a teammate of Hatch’s on the NWSL’s Washington Spirit — get in the tournament.

That brings us to the last talking point.

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When Andonovski declared that Christen Press wouldn’t have been on the U.S. roster even if she hadn’t torn her ACL, it set off one of the biggest firestorms of his tenure. That’s in part because Press has one of the most devoted fan bases of any individual player — not just on the national team, but in the sport as a whole. But it also prompted fair speculation about why a player of her talents is so far down the depth chart.

It may be, as CBS’ Lori Lindsey recently said on one of the network’s soccer podcasts, that there are off-the-field issues at play. Andonovski and the other players have the right to count that as a factor, as any sports team would. But purely in terms of tactics, there’s a place on the field where Press can fit: as the striker who’s closest to Macario’s skill set.

Press hasn’t always thrived as a lone striker in a 4-3-3 or a 4-2-3-1 or whatever one wants to call a setup that doesn’t have two forwards. On paper, though, her ball-playing skills and creativity could make her a good fit on a front line with Pugh and Smith.

That doesn’t necessarily get Press on to a 23-player World Cup squad next year. Macario and Morgan are atop the depth chart right now. Still, the tactical theory is worth thinking about while everyone waits for Press to recover.

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