The United States beat Australia in the opening of both teams' Women's World Cup campaigns Monday. Team USA rebounded from a lackluster first half, flashed some dominance in the second, and took a valuable 3-1 victory.
Now this may be a cultural difference -- but in the US of A, when a team beats your team at a sport, the defeated team's public statements don't generally run along the lines of "they aren't that good."
Down Under, however, the opposite appears to be true. The Football Federation Australia's official website fired shots off the American bow following the match.
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The website ran a things-we-learned type of match report following Australia's 3-1 loss on Monday night. The first item read:
1: The USA, well, they just aren’t that good
Here are the first two paragraphs:
The US certainly like to talk a good game. The reality is they play a fairly rudimentary, bog-standard 4-4-2, were short of ideas going forward and outmanoeuvred tactically. 'Play it long and look for the head of Wambach' seems the default game-plan for a team stuck in the past.
World football has moved, in case Jill Ellis hasn’t noticed. US were outplayed by a better, smarter footballing side – who were also without two certain starters in Polkinghorne and keeper Williams – before the Aussies ran out of gas.
To re-iterate: This is the official website of Australian soccer, not some newspaper or random online outlet.
It's true that the U.S. was fortunate in the first half, relying on a pair of spectacular saves from goalie Hope Solo. And it's true that Australia did acquit itself well overall against an American team that is, by the way, ranked second in the world.
But any doubts about the better squad were put to rest in the second half when the U.S. scored on these two gorgeous strikes -- the first a lovely combo by Sydney Leroux and Christen Press, the second a solo effort by Megan Rapinoe.
The Aussies may have lost the match, but they won the post-game trolling.
Unless this wasn't trolling. Given that everything is upside-down in Oz, perhaps they simply got the score the wrong way round and believed they'd won?