For U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes, the task ahead of her in Saturday’s SheBelieves Cup finale against Colombia was an obvious one.
“Listen, we have to play our game. I’m interested in what we do and how we impose ourselves,” she said in a press conference on Friday. “I’ve said it before: this is a tournament. We have something to win, but for us, it’s just making sure we get all the details right in the game. If we win the game, we win the tournament, and we are absolutely approaching it with the seriousness we do everything.”
Hayes, though, is far from the only one interested in how the USWNT will impose themselves on Saturday. The team’s SheBelieves Cup journey has been marked by a unique selection of details; their wins over Argentina and Canada marked by a sense of professionalism that has ushered in a new phase of Hayes’ reinvention of the national team. Almost a year-and-a-half after she began a project to expand the player pool, Hayes said her youthful version of the USWNT is growing up by finding solutions in challenging games this month. That was especially true in the 1-0 win over Canada on Wednesday, when the U.S. handled the challenge of navigating a match in imperfect conditions.
How to watch USWNT vs. Colombia
- Date: Saturday, March 7 | Time: 3:30 p.m. ET
- Location: Sports Illustrated Stadium — Harrison, N.J.
- TV: TBS | Live stream: HBO Max
“If I take the last game, you’ve got half the group in preseason, half the group in season,” Hayes said. “Do I think we were top fit and top fresh? Some are top fit because they’re in season. Some are less fit but maybe top fresh, and some are less fit and less fresh, right? You get the combination of those things. What I think is important in that when you’re not 100% at your top level is that you exert control and do it over the whole game, not parts of the game and I thought we did that brilliantly.
“I thought we started slowly. I stated that because I think that group hadn’t played together since last November but I thought we grew and grew and grew and I thought that was a game where we weren’t at our best level but we controlled the game in all facets and that’s what I really enjoyed about it is that we didn’t let the game get into a slunk fest or we didn’t let it get into a transition game. We kept the game up their end of the pitch, and when I talk about growing up, that’s coaching these things into this group of players, and they’re just getting so much better at it.”
There’s a sturdiness to the USWNT during this edition of the SheBelieves Cup, players new and old demonstrating a sense of reliability regardless of the task in front of them. That will be the expectation against Colombia, too, with Hayes once again mentioning emotional control as a feature of the layered performance she hopes to see on Saturday. Who exactly will take to the pitch remains a question – the head coach has essentially split her squad into two, Wednesday’s lineup against Canada appearing more like a first-choice team than the relatively inexperienced group that started against Argentina.
“I’ve made it clear this year there will be, particularly in three-game windows, two teams per se that will play, maybe not all of the time, so we can get a chance to develop the connections for a group of players over two games and one group over one of the games,” Hayes said. That, for me, is the bigger priority, putting together situations where, in the case of the last game, Phallon [Tullis-Joyce], [Emily] Sonnett, and [Naomi] Girma develop that connection between those three. Same with Emily Fox and Trinity Rodman on the right-hand side.”
Hayes’ experimentation period has allowed her to learn as much as she can about the talent pool as possible, in some cases, discovering and developing versatility in different players. That is especially true for Ally Sentnor, one of the main beneficiaries of the head coach’s open-door policy and the lone goalscorer against Canada. The 22-year-old has played across the front line for the USWNT but has recently demonstrated her strengths in and around the box as a No. 9.
“I think I always say coming into this team, I’m willing to do whatever role is required, and I love playing any position for this team,” Sentnor said. “I think I talked a lot with Emma and my staff at home on how I can really bring my skill set into each position that I play and that I’m not going to be your typical hold-up, crosses, finishing with my head, in the air type of [No.] 9 but I can bring a lot to that position with speed and agility and turning defenders but I did grow up playing the [No.[ 9 so it feels a little bit like I’m back at home on my club team and that I’m just kind of getting those feelings back, but also adding to my game having played a lot more since then.”
Hayes also emphasized that she has a handful of options available to her. While Claire Hutton, Sam Coffey and Rose Lavelle started in midfield on Wednesday as a deep-lying double pivot, the head coach said her roster is full of players with different profiles, arguably an ideal way to construct a squad while the USWNT use the SheBelieves Cup to simulate tournament settings.
“How many times have them two played together? Not that many times, so they’re still developing that,” she said about Hutton and Coffey, who were solid defensively but were imperfect in springing play forward. “I think sometimes we want all of it to be together all at once but I think there’s a good foundation there, two very tactically intelligent players. Two from-footed players. I think you can secure the middle of the pitch. I think we’ve still got to work the balance right between how we rotate up in those areas to give support to the front players, but listen, they’re so coachable, these two, it’d be easy to do that, but that was the decision for that.
“As always, I approach the game on what the game demands. I think with both Lily [Yohannes] and Lindsey [Heaps], we have different offerings in that area. Listen, I remember times when we talked about, well, maybe we don’t have enough midfield options. I think we’ve got plenty of midfield options. We haven’t even talked about Riley Jackson yet coming through, but I think we’ve got some really good, strong foundations to build on. Now I have to keep putting together the different combinations, so they develop relationships.”
Even during a week that seems to have answered longstanding questions about who the U.S.’ new core players are, Hayes continues to play her cards close to her chest. That may be in large part because of the one thing that is completely out of her control – the sport’s ebbing and flowing calendar, which almost always leaves her with players in varying fitness positions and will likely play a heavy hand in her team selection on Saturday, whether or not the core group is set.
“I don’t know, the questions I get asked are like, ‘Are you getting closer to your established 11?” Hayes said. “But actually, we’re preparing players in the middle of their preseason to start their seasons with their clubs, so we have to prioritize different things in different moments.”
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