Final Thoughts Women´s World Cup 2011

July 30th, 2011 | by: aron | Comments Off

Sweden went into the 2011 Women’s World Cup as anything but favorites. We were thought of as some kind of unknowns. We hadn’t done well at the last Euros and given a string of recent results, just advancing from the group stage would be a feat of its own. Plus we were in a group with two supposedly strong teams: North Korea and the United States. If we did make it out of the group, then we were going to run into Brazil or eventually Germany on the other side.

We ended up winning 1-0 against Columbia and there were a lot of sighs of relief in the press and the public, which showed that there was almost no belief in this team or its coach Thomas Dennerby. In fact Dennerby was criticized from every angle possible. It was at times reminiscent of watching the media descend on Capello or Domenech at the World Cup: everyone seemed to know better what should be done.

Then we beat North Korea, which meant that believe it or not we were going to the quarterfinals. I was pretty stoked at that point because I thought well hey this isn’t so bad then. We are pulling the usual Swedish performance where we do ok, but never look great. The final game was against the United States and I thought to myself well its been nice being here and all but now that we are going to be meeting some real opposition we are going to look like complete amateurs and get sent home early.

We beat the United States 2-1 in a game of Wild West rodeo football in which it could have been won by either team. We got lucky early on and then held on to secure the win. Wambach really is a solid first class striker and she worked and worked and finally pulled back a goal for the United States but we ran out the clock and we won our group. Then we had to play the Australians. This didn’t make me so nervous at first. The fact that I wasn’t nervous then had the effect that I did become nervous. We routed the Australians 3-1 and suddenly we were a game away from the final, but it was against a Japan team that had played a superb game of strategy and let the Germans exhaust themselves and then put in a late strike in overtime.

I had a bad feeling about the semi-final. This is where Sweden teams tend to choke: when it matters the most. Sure enough we choked and big time at that. We opened the scoring on the only mistake the Japanese made in the entire game. After that we fell into some kind of defensive shield playing that the Japanese ran ragged and in the end I was happy it was only 3-1. It really could have been much worse. So much for the title and to be fair looking back, Japan really were the best team at the tournament and they had the extra bits of luck here and there that a champion side needs.

In the third place game we once again took the lead and then let the French work their way back into the game. To add to the misery, we had Josefine Öqvist sent off in a situation where both players should have had red cards. The positive side is that after the red card we suddenly upped our game and took it to the French. Hammarström banged in a dream strike to make it 2-1, off of a corner that never should have happened and we went on to win it 2-1.

After all that talk about a team that didn’t have it in them, we were just ninety minutes away from a final with the USA and to be fair, the bronze was the least we could do. The women played extremely well and with less injury we might have even done better. Lotta Schelin would have been player of the tournament if Homare Sawa hadn’t been the amazing player she was. Thank you ladies for a wonderful tournament and I look forward to the Olympics next year.