Here is a four-minute video of the highlights of yesterday’s Women’s World Cup final, in which Japan defeated the U.S. in a cliffhanger that went to penalty kicks (apologies to those who complain that my description of football doesn’t comport with that seen in the British press):
Highlights: Women’s World Cup
July 18, 2011 • 3:46 am
Your headline is better than in the British press. In the UK you have to spend days avoiding looking at the papers if you intend to watch the match later because of headlines like
JAPAN DEFEATS USA!
At least with your headlines it doesn’t give the result away before people choose whether or not to read on 🙂
Spoiler alert: Japan wins on penalty kicks. 😉
A real shame. That the video doesn’t show the Americans crying, that is.
Solo will be encased in carbonite after this.
What a great name for a celebrity.
Without the vuvezelas, the horrible histrionics and dives, and the sometimes-awful sportsmanship that characterizes the men’s game I thought I was watching a new sport…this was pure soccer bliss. Soccer–football–as it is meant to be. Even the refereeing in the final game was excellent.
Personally, I would have subbed Morgan for Lloyd not Rapinoe, but overall it was good to see the US midfield string together passes that created some great transitions and opportunities. This was some of their best soccer they played in the last 3 or 4 games.
Congrats to Japan on their victory.
This was the first soccer / football match I ever watched in my entire life, and it was rather fun. Who knew? 🙂
Coming back to what Jerry said in a previous post, I think that penalties are sometimes the only way in which a knock-out match can be brought to a close. Sometimes you can just tell that neither team in a game are ever going score- not even in “a month of Sundays”- and so you need something that will bring the match to a definitive end. Otherwise, there is a danger of a match simply going on forever, with neither team taking the initiative and bringing the game to a close. Football is also, of course, an extremely grueling and tiring sport, with the players running around like madmen (or women) for long periods of time, and asking them to just keep on jogging around a vast football pitch, indefinitely, would invariably lead to players collapsing from exhaustion.
In Britain, cup finals used to be replayed if they ended in a draw. This practise was done away with, though, as many felt that the drawn finals felt extremely anti-climactic, with fans whipping themselves up into a frenzy, travelling hundreds of miles to see their team play and spending hundreds of pounds in the process, and then having to do it all over again for the replay- which would end in penalties anyway if there was no winner in THAT game.
That was a ramble- I’ve never actually sat and watched an entire women’s football match, although the level of skill on display here was incredibly high. Even though it was deflected, the way in which the Japanese player “flicked” the ball into the net with the back of her boot for Japan’s second goal was rather spectacular. Congartulations to Japan!