“If you’re at all smart about the media – any press is good press, especially when it comes to women’s sports. The irony of the whole thing is when the US Men win they get all the coverage and when the US Women lose they get the coverage. The problem with that is we are good enough and we are strong women and we do deserve to be in the World Cup in Germany, but we gotta prove it. And in order to prove it– the joke that we’ve been telling each other is ‘we planned this, this is the only way we’re gonna get the kind of coverage we think we deserve and this all just a big joke’…but that’s obviously a joke.” -Abby Wambach, 11/18/2010

A funny thing happened on November 6, 2010. No, I didn’t have to wait to use the ATM because a clown was ahead of me in line or get yelled at by a parrot.[1] This funny thing was less “funny ha ha” and more “funny what the hell?”. See, on November 6th the so-called mainstream sports media started giving a damn about the US Women’s National Team. This fact wouldn’t be extraordinary in some other world where laundry comes out of the dryer folded, groceries shop for themselves, I’m gainfully employed and not still getting carded for beer and cigarettes at the age of 28. But we don’t live in that world. We live in that other world, commonly known as “the real world,” where clothes come out of the dryer still wet, grocery shopping makes me angry, my “job” is the family business that I got fired from six years ago and a casino security guard once pulled my friend aside, pointed at me, and loudly asked “is she old enough to be in here!?” And in this real world, Women’s Soccer in the US is like Fight Club – and if you’ve never seen the movie or read the book, let me fill you in – the first rule of Fight Club is “you do not talk about Fight Club.” Now substitute “Fight Club” for “Women’s Soccer.” (For those of you that failed Mad Libs, that would be: the first rule of Women’s Soccer is “you do not talk about Women’s Soccer.”) On November 6th the USWNT was suddenly big news. It was announced that ESPN would be airing the team’s next match and every mainstream news or sports outlet picked up the AP article or had at least a few lines on the team. To recap, in case you’ve been living under a rock, on November 5th, 2010 the US lost 2-1 to Mexico in Mexico in CONCACAF Women’s World Cup Qualifiers. On November 6th, soccer’s collective head exploded.

Here’s a fun little Google experiment: a search for “US Women’s Soccer” “Italy” gets you somewhere in the neighborhood of 539,000 results. The same search replacing “Italy” with “Mexico” gets you 650,000. But try it with some other recent USWNT opponents – “Haiti,” “Guatemala,” or “Sweden” – and see what happens.[2] A Google News search for “US Women’s Soccer” “Italy” reveals thousands of articles on the subject. So why the all-of-a-sudden coverage of the team? In a word: failure. As in, failure to outright qualify for the Women’s World Cup. And yes, the US’s first ever loss to Mexico and first loss since 2009[3] is big news and indeed newsworthy, but so was the fact that the USWNT was even in Mexico, you know, trying to qualify for the World Cup in the first place.

For further Google-related research, let’s take a look at a pair of recent game winners by very young people; Alex Morgan’s in Italy and Juan Agudelo’s in South Africa. Both get pretty equal results in my ‘Super-Scientific Google Search Experiment,’ which is pretty awesome until you consider the context – Agudelo’s tally came very late in a friendly, Morgan’s in stoppage time of a World Cup Qualifier. But that they even get kinda equal play is the shocking part. Shocking because if Morgan had scored a big goal not related to “the failure,” those results would be skewed in Agudelo’s favor.[4] And while I mean no disrespect to Agudelo – he’s only 17, was one of very few bright spots in a particularly ugly Red Bulls playoff loss to San Jose and his MNT goal was a good one – it was still just a friendly. The minute Dianne Ferreira blew the full time whistle and the US Women failed to qualify outright, the moment in which “The greatest feat in the history of the Mexican Women’s National Team” became reality, suddenly everyone was paying attention.

Since the US lost to Mexico that funny thing’s been happening, a kind of journalistic rubbernecking, holding up traffic on the ol’ soccer superhighway. “Hey, look kids, a wreck! – It’s the shell of a once dominant soccer team, let’s slow the car down and stare!” And while it’s true that no press is bad press and more people are talking about the team than they were before that fateful night in Cancun, it’s also a bit insulting. Insulting because the players had just come off a long WPS season/were in the middle of college or Frauen Bundesliga seasons, into camp, two friendlies with China and then three previous qualifying matches with nary a peep from those outside the soccer media and even some within. The first rule of women’s soccer is…

It’s insulting because we didn’t need a certain writer from a certain Sports magazine that has far fewer drawings in it than its title would suggest’s Twittering or an AP article or a front page spot on ESPN[5] to tell us that this team was in trouble – we already knew. We knew it when we saw those China matches, er, one of those China matches. We knew when they struggled against Sweden in July. But it’s also insulting because we were there when Abby scored her 100th in Rochester, when the US thrashed Germany 4-0 in Cleveland or beat Mexico at Rio Tinto and celebrated with snow angels, when Alex Morgan scored another pretty late goal to ensure the USWNT’s home unbeaten streak would stay intact in Chester. It’s insulting because we eagerly awaited highlights when we heard Hope Solo saved not one but two PKs in a match in the Algarve and sought out maybe not 100% legal streams when the US played in Augsburg. Where was this so-called mainstream media then? …Oh, right, nothing to see here folks, we’re just making soap or something…


It’s insulting because while we all spent Thanksgiving stuffing our faces with Tofurky alongside our families stuffing their faces with turkey, the team was in Chicago, training. Yes, it’s Carli Lloyd’s sorry, their own fault and poor play that got them into this pickle in the first place, but really, that’s not the point.[6] Because they would’ve been there whether the game was gonna be on ESPN3 or not. It’s insulting because Abby Wambach got staples in her head on the sideline and then wrapped the whole thing up in what looked like a combination of whatever crap they could find along the field in a last ditch effort to get back in the match after a nasty head-to-head collision with time ticking down. And Abby woulda still been just as badass with her head-staples whether the AP was gonna write an article on it or not. …You do not talk about women’s soccer.

It’s insulting because we’d just watched four matches online, through a sometimes jumpy feed with occasionally bizarre camera angles and comentarios en Español. Sure, we’d have loved to have JP Dellacamera or Adrian Healey calling the matches and that slick ESPN production or even whatever high school AV Club that FSC uses to produce WPS games, but hell, we learned to love those two (or three? or seven?) guys calling the matches on CONCACAF’s website and they were pretty damn entertaining. And maybe we’re selling ourselves short, getting all defeatist in saying “well, at least we could see the matches at all” but when you have no expectations, it’s pretty easy to exceed them. (I’m not gonna get into how it makes no sense to me that FSC or ESPN wouldn’t want to pick these matches up to promote their own programming again). In that perfect world all the matches would be on TV. And the third place game against Costa Rica was televised and we got Adrian Healey on the call. And the Italy matches were on ESPN3 which ESPN wants us to think is like real TV but really isn’t and I can only see if I pretend I’m my sister, and the return leg in particular was great, with JP and [a sick] Julie Foudy, plus Pedro Gomez and Kate Markgraf and Tony DiCicco via telephone, but it all felt a little halfhearted and hollow and weird – a little bit of too little, too late mea culpa and whole lotta that ugly “what if he crashes?” part that’s in the back of our minds when we’re watching someone try to jump the Grand Canyon on a moped.

It’s insulting because there are plenty of us that really do care and work pretty hard to find coverage of the game and the team – and plenty of us that work pretty hard to cover the game and the team, usually for little or nothing beyond maybe free parking and a press pass and the fact that we care enough to do it anyway and would probably still do it without the press pass and the free parking.[7] And there are plenty of us that pay our own way to get to games and call in to conference calls while we’re supposed to be “working” doing something not soccer related so that we’ve got the money and the time to do the important stuff, the stuff we love, the soccer related stuff.

The real question now is this: now that the wreckage has been cleared and traffic’s started moving again or the guy has landed safely on the other side of the Grand Canyon or whatever other ridiculous metaphor you prefer, who in the world of the Sports Media (read “sports media” in your head – or aloud – in a booming voice for the full effect) is going to stick around to see what happens next and who was just another opposite-of-a-bandwagon jumper, tuning in to see the guy fall to his fiery death or slowing down to see the mangled cars on the side of the road?

[1] Both true stories, by the way, just not ones that happened on the day in question.

[2] I’m leaving China out of this, I’ve already gotten in enough trouble on that subject.

[3] I, unlike US Soccer and others, am counting the US’s loss on PK’s to Sweden in the 2009 Algarve Cup final as a loss. Because I can, and because, uh, it is.

[4] I know this because it happened – see: National Team, US Women vs. China PR, 06 October, 2010 and Morgan, Alex; tying goal.

[5] To clarify, I don’t mean the certain ESPN and SI writers that do fantastic work covering WPS and the WNT. I mean the certain ones that don’t. And he gets a bit of a reprieve for his recent ‘Sportsman of the Year’ piece.

[6] Sorry, Carli Lloyd. We’re both from New Jersey and I appreciate that and you get a little forgiveness for starting the play that led to Alex Morgan’s goal, but really, your team is the team that is dressed like you – you want them to get the ball.

[7] Not that I’m suggesting this.

[8] A less important, but still relevant question: does this make Pia Sundhage Edward Norton’s character and Abby Wambach Tyler Durden?

View Original Post at allwhitekit.wordpress.com

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