#thinkin about buying this book bc it seems an interesting read throughout

[cypher2]

The best goalies have a powerful presence in goal, and their confidence extends outward to their defenders and the rest of the team. This is the case of the American goalie Hope Solo, who is riveting to watch as much for the brilliant, acrobatic saves she makes as for the psychological intensity with which she confronts opposing forwards. Like many other goalies, she didn’t start out in the position, and she learned by scoring goals, not stopping them. As a girl, she was a strong forward, constantly scoring goals. As she recalls it, “No coach would have ever dreamed of taking me off the field and sticking me in goal.” She found solace from a difficult life on the football pitch. “I knew how soccer made me feel,” she writes, “and I knew I wanted to hold onto that feeling for the rest of my life.” She continues, “Life was calm and ordered on the soccer field,” where she felt “free and unburdened.”

“Goalkeeping isn’t glamorous,” Solo writes. “It’s tough and stressful and thankless.” Because youth soccer coaches often put less athletic kids in goal, there’s also a “stigma about goalkeeping,” When Solo was recruited into an Olympic Development Program (ODP) in Washington state, she started playing the position regularly. During her first game with the ODP team, the starting goalkeeper suffered a concussion after colliding with another player in the net. The coach, perhaps sensing something about Solo that would make her a good goalie, asked her to take over for the injured player. She did well and began playing occasionally in the position. Though Solo kept playing forward on her club and high school teams, she found that her knowledge of “how a forward attacks” allowed her to better position herself in goal and know when to run out and break up plays. Anchored in two roles, with a “double identity,” she learned how to think like a goalkeeper and a forward at the same time, closely watching attackers so she could position herself to stop them from scoring.

In 2000, she got her first invitation to train with the US Women’s National Team, then coached by April Heinrichs. The team was fresh off their epochal victory in the 1999 Women’s World Cup, which had drawn record crowds. Solo was a young and untested player, and she found the “skill and confidence level” of the veteran players “daunting.” She found herself in goal behind the legendary defender Brandi Chastain, who had scored the winning penalty kick against China in the 1999 tournament final. Chastain had become an icon not only because of her goal, but because the image of her celebration -- in which she had ripped off her shirt,  revealing her sports bra -- was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and heralded by many as a symbol of the bold strength and success of female athletes. For the young Solo, it was terrifying to be on the field with the famous player. At one point, Chastain turned around to the young goalkeeper and “barked: ‘That’s your ball.’” Solo recalls, “Oh fuck, I thought. Brandi Chastain is yelling at me.” In another practice, Solo maladroitly punted the ball up into the air, and the striker Mia Hamm stopped short, looked at her, and said, “Do you want me to fucking head the ball? Then you need to fucking learn how to drop-kick it.” Solo was mortified: “Oh God, I thought. Now Mia Hamm is yelling at me.”

A goalie’s size is important. Being tall, and having long arms, is an obvious advantage when trying to protect the goal. Yet perhaps even more important is the size of the goalie’s personality. A successful goalie projects authority, commanding and controlling her defenders. She arranges them to defend the goal on free kicks and corner kicks, calculating angles and interpreting the positioning and movement of the opposing players. The confidence of defenders depends on the strength of the goalie--knowing that the goalie has things covered in front of the goal enables them to stand firm, as well as take risks when necessary. When a team has confidence in a goalie, the defenders can move more freely up the field toward the opposing goal, putting more strength in the attack and pressuring the other team. In this sense, the goalie, though invisible in the attack, plays a crucial role in giving the rest of the team the space and inspiration to move forward quickly and aggressively. 

Solo learned about the importance of authority the hard way. She first played for the US Women’s National Team in a game against Iceland in April 2000, and she was chosen again to play archrival Mexico on Cinco de Mayo in Portland. The US dominated the game, winning 4-0. At one point, with Mexico on the attack, Chastain let a ball through and Solo had to dive to make a save. Solo writes, “Brandi turned around and yelled at me--’Come on, Hope!’--blaming me for not coming out for the ball.” Solo knew it was actually Chastain who had made the mistake, but--too respectful of the authority of the veteran player--she didn’t respond. “That was my mistake,” Solo admits. Afterward, Heinrichs spoke to Solo about that incident on the field and her interaction with Chastain. ‘”That tells me you’re not ready, Hope,’ she said. ‘We all knew Brandi made a mistake. Yet you didn’t have the courage to call her out and yell back at her. You’re not ready to lead the defense.’”

In time, of course, Solo would be ready. Though she missed the 2000 Olympics, she played on the under-twenty-one team, and Heinrichs soon brought her back onto the roster of the national team. She attributes much of her improvement to a goalkeeping coach at the University of Washington, Amy Griffin. Soon after Solo started playing for Washington, Griffin handed her a note that said, “A goalkeeper cannot win a game. A goalkeeper saves it.” What Griffin taught Solo was ultimately the key to goalkeeping: the “intellectual side” of the position, the endless work of observation, of calibration, of constantly adjusting one’s position, and of readiness in relationship to the flow of the game. Before training with Griffin, Solo writes, she had taken a relatively direct approach to guarding the net, waiting in goal and using her size and reflexes to stop what came at her. She learned that the key to goalkeeping at the highest level was to think tactically, remaining a few steps ahead. That meant taking charge of positioning defenders, reading the runs of opposing players as they moved across the field, and understanding “how to anticipate and predict what was happening in front of me.”  The key to this was figuring out where the opposing players would likely move and shoot from, and calculating the angles so that she could position herself most effectively. Goalies constantly have to make critical decisions about where to place themselves, and Solo learned how to know when to leave the goal line to confront an onrushing player and when to stay back. All this new awareness made the position “much more interesting.” Rather than “ninety minutes of waiting for my defense to make a mistake,” it became “ninety minutes of tactics and strategy.”

One of the highlights of Solo’s career came during the 2011 Women’s World Cup when the US faced off against Brazil in a riveting game. In the second half of the game, with the US leading 1-0, the referee gave a red card to US defender Rachel Buehler when she tangled with Brazilian striker Marta Vieira da Silva, known as Marta, in front of the goal. The call was controversial, but it was only the first of a bizarre string of refereeing decisions. The Brazilian player Cristiane Rozeira stepped up to take the penalty kick, and Solo made a brilliant diving save. The referee, however, immediately called for the penalty kick to be retaken. It wasn’t clear why at the time, although it was later understood that the call was for encroachment--one of the US players had started to run into the penalty area before the ball was kicked, which is indeed technically a foul, although quite rarely called. Solo argued with the referee and got a yellow card. Then Marta walked up to take the second penalty kick and struck it fast into the net. Solo was beaten this time. The sequence was enough to drive any goalkeeper mad. Solo kept her composure, though, throughout the rest of the game, even making key saves. In the shoot-out, Solo blocked one crucial penalty kick, winning the game for the US.

In the 2015 World Cup, Solo’s goalkeeping was once again critical to the US success. Against a powerhouse German team in the semifinal, Solo saved the game early on when the referee granted a penalty kick. German star striker Célia Šašić stepped up to take it. I was there in the stadium that day, and I could barely watch, sure that Šašić would make it. Solo did something odd, clearly aiming to psych out the German striker. She started to sort of stroll away from goal. It almost looked, for a moment, like she had just decided that she was done, that she was leaving for good. As Carli Lloyd remembers, “It was a very leisurely stroll. If there were flowers nearby, she would’ve stopped to pick them.”  It was a dangerous move: the referee could have given her a yellow card for it. Just in time, Solo turned back, came into goal, and stared down Šašić who, very uncharacteristically, sent the ball wide to the left of the goal. We went crazy in the stadium. “Sometimes,” Lloyd recalls, “even in the heat of a big game, you can feel the momentum shift on the spot.” That moment was “one of those times,” and the US went on to defeat Germany, and then win against Japan in the final.

Laurent Dubois | The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer | March 2018