The United States women’s national team plays Vietnam in its first World Cup match on Friday, and the team faces the pressure of winning an unprecedented third consecutive World Cup.
The expectation and goal is to win, and head coach Vlatko Andonovski didn’t shy away from that while talking to reporters during the team’s media day on June 27, according to Just Women’s Sports.
“Would I be happy with anything short of a third straight win? No, absolutely not,” he said. “Our goal is to win the World Cup, there’s no question about it.”
Days after scoring a brace in the team’s send-off match on July 9, Trinity Rodman spoke to ESPN’s “Fútbol Americas” ahead of her first World Cup with the same confidence as Andonovski and said that the U.S. is “going to get the title.”
“Obviously the team has changed so much over the last couple of World Cups, even the past couple of months, but this team is something special. We want it more than ever, so I expect a gold medal,” she said, per Just Women’s Sports.
Team co-captain Alex Morgan, who is playing in her fourth World Cup, was asked by a reporter last week during media availability how often the team discusses the word “three-peat.”
“It’s actually never thrown around with the team,” she said. “We have 14 first timers for the World Cup, and we see this as our own journey.”
Morgan views each four-year block leading up to a World Cup as its own and says the team is focused on taking each game one at a time, starting with Friday’s match against Vietnam.
“Looking to make history, that would be great with what you said about three-peat, but this team, that’s all in the back of our minds. It’s really just winning each game as it comes,” she said.
When speaking with the media on Wednesday, World Cup rookie Sophia Smith reiterated that the team isn’t getting ahead of itself and is instead focusing on the current opponent.
“Every game’s important,” she said. “This game (against Vietnam) is the only game we’re focused on right now. It’s gonna be a hard game. It doesn’t matter who we’re playing, every World Cup game is a challenge, and it’s going to take all of us to win every game that we play. We’re very focused on this first game and hope to start this tournament off on the right foot.”
Smith acknowledged the “big target” the U.S. players have on their backs. She also recognizes the magnitude of what the U.S. women’s national team has accomplished and hopes to add to it.
“It’s obviously incredible what this team has done, and all we hope to do is to kind of continue on that legacy and push the boundaries and be even better and make history and do things that teams have never done,” she said.
Smith is a frontrunner to win the NWSL’s Golden Boot award for the player who has scored the most goals, but she won’t let thoughts about individual accolades and winning the World Cup’s Golden Boot cloud her overall focus of winning the World Cup.
“I’m thinking about winning the World Cup. I’m thinking about winning the first game against Vietnam. Whatever that looks like, whoever scores, whatever the score is, a win is a win, and that’s the biggest thing to me,” she said. “If it takes me scoring a lot of goals for us to win, I’ll do that. If it takes me playing a lot of defense, I’ll do that. We all have the same goal, and it’s to win and it’s to start off by beating Vietnam and whatever it takes to do that.”
The U.S. plays Vietnam on Friday at 7 p.m. MDT. The match will be broadcast on Fox and can also be streamed on FoxSports.com and the Fox Sports App.
