Sweden make the Semi-final!

July 11th, 2011 | by: aron | Comments Off

The Swedish media, and here I generalize and put them all together in the same batter as Expressen and Aftonbladet, spent the month leading up to the Women’s World Cup playing down our chances for a medal. There were several reasons for this, but the most prominent three were: we just weren’t good enough any more, the other national sides had improved so much in the last few years, and finally it was being played in Germany and therefore the winners of the two previous cups were to be held as the favorites. I can buy the whole “Germany has this in the palm of their hands” thing, but a lot of the other stuff I didn’t know enough about to comment.

I watched the 2007 Women’s World Cup and was extremely disappointed to see Sweden exit the way they did and so early at that. For that reason I also accepted the press version of the way things were going to go this time around. When I looked over the squad before the opener against Colombia I found myself thinking wait a second, this is a decent squad and I know most of these names. We even had something of a super striker in Lotta Schelin. Still I had my doubts. We were in a tough group anyway: Colombia, North Korea, and the United States (whom we hadn’t beaten since the stone age anyway). First we beat Colombia in a game where we made a habit of missing as many chances as possible (Schelin could have kept playing with open goals and she still wouldn’t have hit them). Then we beat North Korea. I breathed a sigh of relief and thought: well look we made it to the quarterfinals so that is not all that bad eh? We still had one more group game to go though and that was against the Americans. Then we won that 2-1 after holding on for dear life in the second half. It was the kind of game that would have made a nail biter out of a corpse!

We were group winners and now we weren’t going to play Brazil like everyone had planned, but instead we had a date with the Australians. I breathed another sigh of relief: it’s a fair game then! This of course was when things took a turn for weirdsville. First Japan took Germany to the cleaners and walked away with a 1-0 win in overtime. Then the French beat the English on penalties (though that wasn’t all that strange in some odd kind of way). We beat the Australians 3-1 though despite the nice score line it was a much closer game then it now seems. Finally the Americans huffed and puffed and with one woman less overpowered Brazil and the referee.

Sweden now has a semifinal date with the Japanese on this coming Wednesday and suddenly we are in the race for the Cup. The media has warmed a bit towards the national team, but I think they could have been much more congratulatory then they are at the moment. This is good news for Swedish football as a whole! Now, as for the game on Wednesday, I have no doubts that Japan is going to give everything they have (which incidentally is a lot) and I expect a really tough game on Wednesday (read another nail biter) but I also think that we now have this in our own hands plus Schelin has found the back of the net again! If we do make it to the finals we will probably run into the USA again and since we have already beat them once this tournament, I think we should keep things going in that direction.

Here is to the Swedish Women: thank you for a damn good tournament this far!