The U.S. women’s national team’s trip to Europe for some big-time friendlies did not go according to plan.
The USWNT fell 2-0 to Spain on Tuesday, marking their first back-to-back losses in over five years. Goals from Laia Codina and Esther González were enough to give Spain their first-ever win over the USWNT.
The USWNT had entered this FIFA window on a 13-game winning streak, including a CONCACAF W Championship run that saw them avoid conceding even a single goal, but a 2-1 loss to England was followed by a lethargic performance against a Spanish side that was missing many top players after much of the squad said they would no longer play for head coach Jorge Vilda.
To find the last time the USWNT fell in two straight games, you have to go all the way back to the Jill Ellis era, and far into it. At the 2017 SheBelieves Cup, they fell to a 1-0 loss to England, who got their winner in the 89th minute. That lead into arguably the worst loss of Ellis’ tenure, a 3-0 capitulation against France in the USWNT’s final visit to RFK Stadium.
Vlatko Andonovski, who had entered this pair of games having lost just twice in 49 games (41W-6D-2L) since being appointed USWNT boss, will be hoping for a similar turnaround that the 2017 team showed.
Inflection point
After the loss to France, the USWNT went on a 27-game unbeaten run, winning 25 times. Ellis turned away from some unsuccessful tactical ideas after those losses, and while the team did lose to high-level European opposition before the 2019 World Cup (France won a January 2019 friendly 3-1 in Le Havre), momentum and cohesion within the program had clearly shifted in a positive direction throughout 2018.
While the USWNT entered this window short-handed due to injuries to many regulars, and also had the emotional toil of the Yates investigation to work through, some patterns — an inability to truly control the midfield in possession, and leaving too much space in defensive transition among them — predate those issues.
With the 2023 World Cup less than a year away, Andonovski has good cause to examine whether this is just a blip, or if this is his version of that critical moment in the Ellis era.
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