LYON, France — Here, at 8 p.m. Tuesday, was the moment that might’ve been Alex Morgan’s. This, an Olympic semifinal, was the very stage on which her vast experience would have been prized. The U.S. women’s national team sputtered scoreless into extra time of a second straight knockout round match. Most soccer coaches, suckers for conventional wisdom, would’ve turned to their veteran striker off the bench.
But not Emma Hayes.
Hayes left her veteran striker, Morgan, at home.
She handed attacking keys to Sophia Smith, Trinity Rodman and Mallory Swanson, who have led the USWNT to an Olympic final, and repaid their new coach’s faith.
They are, at last, the front three of the future and the present. They have been empowered by Hayes, who took charge of the USWNT in May, after years of jostling with Morgan and others for playing time. For most of last year, Swanson was injured; Smith was pushed out to the left wing, so that Morgan could play centrally; she and Rodman crumbled under World Cup pressure, and in a rigid system that refused them freedom and individual expression.
Now, with Morgan out of the picture, omitted from the Olympic roster, they have been liberated.
Hayes, Rodman said, “wants us to thrive the way that we always have. And I think that’s something that she embeds in the way that she coaches: She doesn’t want to change anybody’s style. She wants everybody to be creative in their own ways. And she lets that happen while also trying to put her structure and her principles in, sprinkled in there. But allowing us to play free has been extremely successful.”
The first step, though, was simply allowing them to play. Prior to Hayes’ long-awaited arrival in late May, the three had never started a game together. Swanson (née Pugh) had fallen to the fringes of the USWNT roster in her early 20s. When she re-emerged, around the same time Rodman rose, then-USWNT coach Vlatko Andonovski never gave the three an opportunity to jell together — because he was fixated on starting Morgan as a traditional No. 9 (perhaps as a placeholder for the injured Catarina Macario).
So he pushed Smith to the left wing — even as she tore up the National Women’s Soccer League as a center forward. He put Swanson on the right; then Swanson tore her patellar tendon. Rodman replaced her, and Lynn Williams briefly replaced a struggling Rodman at the World Cup, where the USWNT attack was anemic. Morgan, a USWNT legend, had seemingly forgotten how to score.
But she was still Alex Morgan. After being left off a roster this winter, she returned as an injury replacement, and helped the USWNT gut out a W Gold Cup title. Her late-career skill set, as a selfless target forward, still had no parallel. She seemed probable for the Olympic roster.
Hayes, though, had a different outlook.
“It was a tough decision, especially considering Alex’s record and history with this team,” she said upon naming the team. “I felt I wanted to go in another direction, and selected other players.”
She wanted to entrust Swanson, 26, and Smith, 23, and Rodman, 22, with the transformation of the USWNT. She wanted to build around speed and 1-v-1 skill, around dynamism and interchangeability and audacity. And she wanted them to “suffer” together in big moments.
She has started the SSR trident in eight of her nine games at the helm — all except a mostly B-team friendly against South Korea. They took some time to find their way, but here in France, they have been excellent. They’re “dynamic as hell,” Hayes said. They have scored nine of the USWNT’s 11 Olympic goals. Rodman won the quarterfinal with a worldie; Swanson and Smith then combined to beat Germany.
“They’re like the Big Three,” midfielder Sam Coffey said, “but they’re all Michael Jordan.”
As a newly minted trio, they’ve been in search of a nickname. “I feel like something simple is good,” Smith said. One fan bestowed Rodman with a sign that dubbed them “The Holy Trinity” — but that doesn’t work, because it’s her first name. Christen Press, a former USWNT star, coined “Triple Trouble,” and Smith likes that one. Swanson initially sounded puzzled by it, but when informed of the source, she said: “Then yeah. If Press said it, of course.”
Her word to describe playing alongside Smith and Rodman, however, was even simpler: “Fun.”
Smith agreed: “I mean, it’s so fun.”
They have all been playing with a joy that was noticeably, painfully absent last summer in New Zealand. Swanson attributed it to “the fluidity between all players in the front line, the midfield,” which is “super special.” It’s a departure from the Andonovski days, when Morgan was always through the middle, and Smith almost always left of center or wide left. Now, under Hayes, the USWNT has often been building in a 3-1-4-2 shape, with Smith and Swanson up front, Rose Lavelle playing off them, and Rodman wide right — but none of that is set in stone.
“We’re all so dynamic,” Smith said. “We all love to play a similar game. And we like to go in transition, but we’re also learning we can play, we can possess the ball, and we can combine.”
Smith in particular “has just f***ing gone on another level in this tournament,” as Hayes said; and part of the reason is her positioning. “I love playing the 9. It’s what I play in Portland. It’s where I do feel comfortable,” Smith said. But then she added: “With our front three, we can all play everywhere. … Mal can go at the 9, I can go out wide, Trin can — I mean, we can all go wherever. I think that’s what’s so special about us. And it’s what makes us so hard to defend.”
They will surely start once again in Saturday’s gold-medal final against Brazil. They are the primary reason the USWNT looks completely different than it did 12 months ago, when it exited the World Cup earlier than ever. And the most remarkable part about the turnaround is that, aside from Swanson-for-Morgan, the players who’ve engineered it are many of the same ones who flopped last summer.
“We have the talent,” Smith said. “We just needed someone to come in and believe in us, and put us in the best position to succeed. And Emma’s doing exactly that.”
“And this team is so special,” Smith also said. “We’re young. And we’re just finding ways to win games. We don’t have the most experience in the world, but that doesn’t matter. ’Cause we’re working for each other.”
