Women’s World Cup: U.S. Faces Portugal With Chance to Control Its Path

They don’t technically must win, in fact. A tie shall be sufficient to get the Americans by way of to the spherical of 16, and even a loss may do it within the unlikely occasion that the Netherlands loses to Vietnam on the similar time. But the United States girls’s group doesn’t go on the lookout for ties, or facet doorways. Its ethos is to win, and to make recollections.

Every World Cup has its moments. Predictable moments and painful moments. Surprising moments and iconic moments. Rapinoe, who’s at her fourth World Cup, has seen all of them. She has created various of them. But Rapinoe additionally acknowledges, maybe higher than anybody at this 12 months’s match, when one has arrived.

And Tuesday, a sport when the United States can win its group and discover its footing over 90 minutes or stumble and maybe — unlikely, sure, however potential — even exit the World Cup, is a kind of moments. Rapinoe, whether or not she performs within the sport or not, is embracing it. She is, actually, welcoming it.

“It’s a pressure moment,” she mentioned. “And that’s what the tournament is now. Every single game from here on out is a pressure moment. And that’s the best part of being at the World Cup.”

“We go into these moments like: ‘Hell yeah,’” she added. “This is exactly where we want to be.’

It will not, however, be the kind of stroll U.S. fans have come to expect in the group stage. The United States is a team in transition, a mix of veteran World Cup champions and fresh-faced World Cup rookies that has struggled both to dominate weaker teams and to unlock stronger ones.

It a team that has not found it easy to score goals, either: The Americans haven’t score more than three goals in a game since January, and haven’t scored six in a match since 2021. But they might need a bunch on Tuesday, when the Netherlands will try to bury Vietnam on the scoreboard to catch the United States on goal difference, the potential tiebreaker in the group standings if both teams win. (The U.S. and the Netherlands also can each advance with a draw.)

Portugal will be ready to prevent that: It held the Netherlands to a single goal last week and frustrated England, the European champion, in a scoreless tie in early July. It will, its coach said this week, be ready to put up a fight.

But what Portugal wants to do, what the Netherlands wants to do, was not the primary concern this week for Rapinoe, or her teammates, or her coach, Vlatko Andonovski. The United States knows it has arrived at a special moment in this World Cup. All it has to do now, the players said, is seize it.

“We have a job to do, and that is first and foremost, take care of our game,” Andonovski mentioned.

“We don’t want to look two, three four steps forward,” he added. “This is the first step. Let’s make sure we get in the next stage. Because if we start thinking too far ahead, our chance may never come.”