You've gotta have Hope, Musn't Sit Around and Mope

One of my co-writers is, if I'm lucky, handling the debrief today. So I want to turn my attention to the US Women's National Team story. I've waited until now for a few reasons. First, many others have been giving their opinion, and they are worth reading. Special call outs to Andrea Canales, Dan Loney, and I-66 who had the opinions right from the very beginning. Second, I wanted to wait until the tournament was over before I said a few things. Which is really what I hope the members of the US Women's team will do.

I think the first thing that must be said is that it is utterly ridiculous the way this story has been allowed to turn. Hope Solo is the one person who had nothing, NOTHING, to do with the US Women's loss to Brazil, so I suppose it is natural that U.S. Soccer and the rest of the Women's team is scapegoating her for the troubles. Ridiculous. On Solo, yes, it was impolitic for her to say some things about Scurry, but was she wrong? If you have a top keeper, don't you want them to believe that they can get to every ball, and make every save? That's certainly the mindset I would want my keeper in. So I have no problem with her comments at all, and like many I have more problems with her apology than her initial statements. You know things are a bit screwed up when the PTI crew on ESPN have the right sentiments.

For Greg Ryan to claim his mistake was not using Scurry soon enough is also utterly pathetic:

``My mistake was not leaving them more in a dual starting role from an earlier period of time,'' Ryan said Saturday. ``I think we needed two kinds of goal keepers in this World Cup.''

Apparently what Ryan is saying is that he wasn't happy with the two clean sheets that Solo handed to him, and that Brianna Scurry would have had Wambach's stitches done and the bleeding stopped in the North Korea game.

What's shocking is that I don't think anyone reading this blog disagrees with any of these statements. Everyone, but everyone, knows that Ryan is the one who screwed up. Well, everyone but the establishment. When there is such a divide between popular opinion and the feelings of the machine, one of two things is most likely true: Either they understand the process a whole lot better than the rest of us, or they are walled off from reality in a dangerous way. The latter looks to be the case in this situation. The masses are right, and we should have pitchforks right about now.

There's also one word that is floating around that no one has used, but I think should be brought up right about now, and that word is Patriarchy. I probably can't do as good a job explaining this as some people might, but there does seem something rather sexist about the entire ordeal. This article shows the way in which the male power structure as US Soccer was early on attempting to control the message:

We were busy getting a clip from Abby Wambach when I saw Hope Solo, clearly upset, walking by. I said quietly, "Hope, do you want to comment?" The press person for the U.S., Aaron Heifetz, said out loud to me, "She didn't play, you only want to talk to people who played the game." Hope spun on her heels when she heard Heifetz say that and said, "No, I want to talk!" This is after she had walked by ESPN and other crews waiting to get clips. We were the first crew to interview her, and the first thing she said is that it was the wrong decision not to put her in net, and that she would have stopped those shots. Also, she said, the only people who would have made that decision, didn't understand the game of soccer. A stunning announcement from her, and clearly something the press person didn't want her to say. She went on to say she didn't understand the decision, that this was 2007, not 2004 (a reference to Scurry's performance in the Olympic final in 2004) and that she was terribly upset by the decision to keep her on the sidelines.

She was honest, fair, and to the point, and in my opinion, quite brave to even do the interview when she was clearly devastated at the team's result. Even more interestingly, as she walked away from the interview, she again spun on her heels and said to Heifetz: "Don't you ever tell me what interviews I can do."

Then we attempted to talk to goalkeeper Briana Scurry about the game. The same PR person who told us we can only talk to players who actually played the game, refused to let Scurry stop to talk to us. I called out to Scurry to ask her to talk and she pointed to Heifetz and said, "He's the boss." I told her she was her own boss and Hope was willing to talk to us. Scurry shook her head, and walked away.

Heifetz, who may be played by Rainn Wilson in the movie, was doing his job trying to control the message on behalf of the power structure of US Soccer, a traditionally male power structure. Solo spoke truth to power, and for that she had to be punished. Of course, once the event had happened, you can expect a bunch of snide, yet telling, comments to follow:

A male colleague reported that some of his emails have consisted of "You're sympathizing with a backstabbing harpy because she's cute."

Interestingly, my wife voiced a similar opinion along those lines. To be cute is one thing, to be correct is another, but to be both is intolerable. And naturally the rest of the women's team turns on Solo. Why? To defend a man who sold them out, who doesn't deserve their support. They're upset at Solo for betraying one of their own, without realizing that Coach Ryan had already betrayed them all. He had one job to do: Put the best team out there with a chance to win, and he failed. Not only that, he failed repeatedly. The 4-3-3 was always a problem, and our midfield suffered because of it. But he didn't change that. Why do they rally around him? Why do they continue to ostracize the person who had the guts to call it like it was? I don't know. Some if it may be the fact that they know the field players are also to blame, and Solo takes attention away from them. But more of it seems to be a power dynamic based opinion.

We have to ask ourselves what this situation would be like if the team gender was different. What if Bob Bradley had, in a knock-out game, replaced Tim Howard with Tony Meola because Tony had a great performance against Brazil back in the day. And if Howard had called out Bradley, do you think the rest of the players would instantly ostracize Tim Howard? I don't. I think you might hear comments along the lines of "that wasn't the way to handle the situation" from the players, but there wouldn't be a rush to send Howard to the hinterlands of soccer. The team probably wouldn't decide he couldn't be on the team plane. No, part of this at least is an issue of gender. Some people don't like the idea that the mild mannered delicate flowers of womanhood might have controversial opinions, and therefore they must be silenced. What's worse is how many women who I normally respect (*Cough*Julie Foudy*Cough*) are enabling this opinion. It's self-sabotage of the highest order.

All I know is that in two years, if Hope Solo is looking for a team, I hope the Washington Freedom can make her an offer worth listening to, and I hope our fans support the one person who played in the 2007 Women's World Cup and never lost us a game. I mean, Solo and Kati Jo Spisak would be a pretty good one-two keeping combo. Perhaps good enough to even rotate between keepers with.