The Daily: 1st August 2023
Ten thoughts so far on the Women's World Cup
We’re coming to the end of the group stages of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, and it is already clear that this is a very different tournament to that held four years ago. Perhaps this is just the rate of change that should be expected when women’s football is expanding at such a rapid rate as we have seen over the last couple of decades. As this phenomenon is showing few signs of abating yet, we should probably expect this development to continue. Here are some thoughts and observations from the first week and half of the tournament.
1. The pace and technical finesse of women’s football continues to increase exponentially.
Matches are being played at what looks like a much higher pace than in previous years, but this isn’t just a matter of physicality. First touches have improved. Passing is more consistent. Teams look better organised, defences better drilled and fitter. This truly feels like a tournament being played by professionals, but while that feeling has been growing over the last couple of World Cups…
2. The biggest improvements have come from the women’s game’s developing nations.
When the USA team took to the pitch for their opening match against Vietnam, there were concerns that their tournament may start in a way similar to that in which it had four years earlier, when they put away 13 goals without reply against Thailand. But this time around things were different and despite having 28 shots to none, the US team were limited to a 3-0 win.
This wasn’t an isolated incident of a ‘smaller’ nation putting up a spirited performance at this summer’s tournament. The Philippines registered a win against one of the co-hosts. Nigeria beat the other. Haiti limited European champions England to a 1-0 win. Zambia recorded a first-ever tournament win. Jamaica held France to a draw.
The favourites will likely still make up the last two, three or four in this World Cup, but there is a definite feeling of the gap between the richest/biggest/interpret it as you choose nations and the rest is narrowing considerably. In no small part, this is likely because of the ongoing development of the women’s game, and in particular its growing professionalisation.
Haiti is a good example of this. They only lost narrowly to both England and the first winners of this competition in 1991, China. Of their squad, 14 play in the United States and 7 play in Europe, mostly in France. It is obvious that the inward flow of confidence in women’s football, whether through increased participation, an explosion in the number of women’s clubs being formed, financial investment or media attention, is reaping tangible benefits.
It will not be a good thing, should the resources of the women’s game end up in such a small number of hands as they do in the men’s version, but it is clear that investment, in time, in professionalism, and in infrastructure, was necessary. One of the questions that faces the women’s game now is how it deals with this growth, but such concerns are for another day. For now, what’s noticeable is that standards are rising across the board.
3. If the USA are to successfully defend their title, they’re going to have to work harder for it than they did in 2019.
It follows naturally, then, to add that the USA are certainly not finding things as straightforward as they did in France four years ago. Their win against Vietnam was followed by a 1-1 draw against the Netherlands, a repeat of the 2019 final which didn’t feel like the fairly routine win that came in Paris four years earlier.
The USA have the best squad of the players in the tournament and the Netherlands controlled the game after taking a first half lead but failed to build on it. Lindsey Horan’s second-half headed equaliser was enough for a point and in the closing stages the USA
The USA are almost certain to get through after their final group match, but a repeat of their stately process victory feels nothing like as much of a sure thing as it did in 2015 or 2019 on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, although it should be added that this is a young team with a relatively small number of very experienced players, and that they are likely to improve as the tournament progresses.
4. England have been here before.
What about those Lionesses, then? Current European champions and beaten semi-finalists to the USA four years earlier, England headed to the Antipodes in a mixed frame of mind. On the one hand, they remain firmly ensconced in the top four in FIFA’s rankings. Confidence was always going to be high. But on the other, injuries to key players looked as though the team had been shorn of much of its attacking threat.
So England have started with two 1-0 wins. Nothing earth shattering, but a comfortable start which means that they go into their final match against China having already qualified for the knockout stages. Last year, they kicked off their Euros with a narrow 1-0 win against Austria. In 2019 they started by edging past Scotland with a 2-1 win. In 2015 they started with a defeat, 1-0 to France.
Not starting with some sort of explosion is kind of on-brand for this England team, though it is also worth adding that they followed up that win against Austria by rattling eight goals past Norway without reply in their second. There were certainly few signs of that in their second game against Denmark. But they’re through with a game to play, and that’s about as much as could be expected of them, so far. Should they win their group (and a win from their final game against China will ensure this), they’ll play Nigeria in the next round.
5. It’s certainly not that there have been no surprise results, at these finals.
The gaps between the haves and have-nots in football have been obvious in international football for as long as it’s been played, but that gap is closing and arguably the biggest surprise of the group stages so far came when one of the favourites to win this World Cup got a little complacent. Their 6-0 win against Morocco in their opening match, but against Colombia came completely unstuck, losing 2-0 and now need at least a draw from their final match against South Korea to ensure qualification for the next round.
Colombia, whose confident and assured performances in winning their first two matches has inevitably led to them being described as ‘dark horses’ in some quarters, were excellent value for their win against Germany, and those looking for a good news story might wish to consider Linda Caicedo, who scored their second goal. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in early 2020, when she was aged 15, and had surgery to remove her tumour alongside six months of chemotherapy. Few other players in the history of the game have worked so hard to get a World Cup.
6. Canada have been the biggest let-downs of the tournament so far.
Oh, Canada. As I write these words, the last gasps of Canada’s run in this tournament is coming to an end. After a goalless draw against Nigeria in their opening match, they needed an own goal to help them past an Ireland team making their Women’s World Cup finals debut—congratulations to Ireland, by the way, on picking up their first ever finals point with a goalless draw against Nigeria in their final match—and then, when they really needed a big performance, fell to pieces in their final group match against Australia and lost 4-0. The seventh-ranked team in the world and defending Olympic champions are eliminated from the tournament having scored just one goal in three matches.
7. Australia’s renaissance is keeping an important flame alight.
There was a period last week when it looked very much as though, for the first time in a men’s or women’s World Cup, we might get through to the knockout stages without a representative from one of the host nations. That New Zealand, a small nation ranked outside of the the world’s top twenty, might have found the going a little bit too much, even though elimination after having won their opening game against Norway must have stung, Australia’s failure to take all three points felt like it could be a calamity starting to unfold, especially after the news of injury to Sam Kerr broke.
This is, to put no too small a point upon it, Kerr’s World Cup. She is the one player from the host nation known throughout the world, and any absence due to injury from this tournament would have been heart-breaking, both for the player concerned and Australia in a broader sense. The thoroughness of Australia’s 4-0 win against Canada has at least ensured that they didn’t have to chance throwing Kerr on out of desperation and risk perhaps even aggravating it further.
As they are playing the runners-up from Group D, it remains uncertain who their opponents will be in the round of sixteen. At the exact time of writing, it could be England, Denmark, China or Haiti. With 75,000 people behind them at Stadium Sydney for this match no matter what, it might just turn out that losing their second match to Nigeria gave the team a retrospectively useful boot up the collective backside. And it is good for the tournament to continue to have a host team competing into the knockout stages.
8. Japan hit on the break to puncture a rapidly-inflating Spanish balloon.
Following their first two matches, only one team had put in two fully cohesive performances. Spain brushed aside Costa Rica and Zambia in their opening two matches, but the increasingly blithe confidence their chances of lifting the trophy were brought crashing back to earth by a 4-0 defeat to Japan in their final group match.
Japan have long had something of the quality of a curate’s egg about them, but as winners of this competition in 2011, Olympic champions in 2012 and runners-up in 2015, the occasional apparent belief of European teams that they simply don’t have to turn up against them to get a result remains as surprising as it ever has.
It was clear that Japan had watched Spain, figured out how to break at pace against them, and had a plan to put into action. The result was one of the best performances of this entire tournament so far. Spain will be wiping their brows with relief at the fact that their qualification was already confirmed before the match kicked off.
9. Sweden find a move which completely overwhelms Italy.
It is an undeniable truth that women who play football tend to be smaller than men who do, and this opens up intriguing tactical possibilities. Sweden clearly clocked their height advantage over Italy and put that advantage into play in their group match by repeatedly hurling in inswinging corners for one of their players to effortlessly get on the end of and nod into the goal. In honesty, after really having to labour to come from behind and beat South Africa in their opening match, Sweden needed that result. They play an Argentina team who are now without a win after eleven matches in the Women’s World Cup finals in their final match.
10. The tournament does feel like it was scheduled to be played at a leisurely pace.
The officiating has been pretty good, with few causes for complaint, the television coverage in the UK has been excellent, and the matches have felt considerably more competitive than they did four years ago. If there’s one little gripe I do have about these finals, it's their scheduling. Believe it or not, if you’re reading this on the day it was published, there are still 19 days until the final.
There is an element of optical illusion about this. The 2023 Women’s World Cup is taking the same amount of time as the last two Women’s World Cups, and only five days longer than last year’s Euros. But there is a curious element to all of this, in that FIFA opted not to start the tournament until well into July, even though this meant that the latter stages of the tournament would clash with the opening weekends of many of the big domestic men’s leagues.
Presumably they’ve run the numbers on this and consider it agreeable to do so, but it certainly seems odd that this should be the case, especially when it’s winter in the southern hemisphere, meaning that the weather would be sufficiently temperate in mid June as to negate any concerns over the conditions. It feels odd that the final will be kicking off at 11.00 in the morning on a day when top European men’s leagues will be featuring further matches in the afternoon. It doesn’t clash, but you might have thought that FIFA would have wanted to give the Women’s World Cup final a day completely to itself. Was that really too much to ask?