A familiar sight.

It appears Marta’s path to her fifth consecutive FIFA Player of the Year award became even clearer as FIFA today released the short list for the 2010 edition. The original list of ten names has been trimmed to three. Marta, fresh off the 2010 WPS Championship title with FC Gold Pride and second-straight Golden Boot honor, heads the list.

Fatmire Bajramaj helped Turbine Potsdam to the double in the 2009-2010 Frauen-Bundesliga season, winning the team’s second straight league title and its first ever UEFA Champions League crown. Bajramaj finished fourth in the goal-scoring chart with 16 goals.

Frankfurt’s Birgit Prinz rounds out the list and her inclusion is more dubious. Prinz is undoubtedly one of the best female players to have ever played the game but this year’s nomination suggests that she was selected more for her name than for her performance on the pitch. Frankfurt finished a disappointing third in the league and Prinz scored 12 goals, good enough for merely seventh overall. (Prinz already has 20 league goals this season and currently tops the goal-scoring chart.)

Prinz’s place may have perhaps been better suited going to one of the other nominees, including Abby Wambach, Christine Sinclair, Alexandra Popp or Ji So-Yun.

Wambach led the Washington Freedom to its second straight WPS postseason after scoring a second-best 13 goals and collecting a second-best 8 assists. Perhaps no female player was more clinical for her National Team than Wambach was this year. The striker scored 16 goals in 17 USWNT games. Six of those games featured multi-goal performances. Moreover, Wambach failed to score in two consecutive games just once.

Sinclair should also feel hard done to have not received a nod. The 27 year-old had a terrific campaign with FC Gold Pride, leading the league in assists with 9. She also led Canada to its second ever CONCACAF Women’s Gold Cup title, scoring six goals and netting the penalty in the Final that gave Canada its crown.

This year’s exploits of 19 year-olds Alexandra Popp and Ji So-Yun should not be overlooked. Popp came to the fore this summer scoring 10 goals in six matches en route to Germany’s victory in the 2010 U-20 FIFA Women’s World Cup. South Korea’s wunderkind Ji So-Yun was nearly impressive in the tournament, scoring eight goals. In doing so, she became the first South Korean player – man or woman – to score a hat-trick in a FIFA competition. Ji also led the 2010 Asian Games with five goals and helped South Korea claim the bronze medal.

The shortlist for the first-ever Coach of the Year award was released simultaneously and it includes only National Team managers. Germany Women’s National Team coach Silvia Neid is up for contention, as is Germany’s U-20 manager Maren Meinert. USWNT coach Pia Sundhage has also peculiarly made the cut.

Meinert should win the award by default, as she is the only coach in the bunch to have actually won something this year (the Algarve Cup doesn’t count). The former National Team great led the U-20’s to an emphatic championship this past summer. Germany was not involved in any international competition that mattered and the United States could only manage third-best in CONCACAF Women’s World Cup Qualifying. Sundhage’s inclusion again speaks to the ‘name v. actual performance’ question that typically riddles this award.

It’s a shame to see FC Gold Pride manager Albertin Montoya not make the list. A trip to Zurich would probably be scant consolation for the loss of his team, but it still would have been nice to see the coach of the supposed best women’s club team in history get recognized.

View Original Post at allwhitekit.wordpress.com | View jennaawk's Full Profile

• Filed Under:  
• Soccer, Sports, SportsPLUS, WNT, Awards, FIFA