The wounds were closed, until Solo re-opened them with her memoir after the 2012 Olympics. But new coach Pia Sundhage worked a miracle to get the team on the same page to win the 2008 Olympics. That’s unlikely – Brazil were simply a class above the USA at the time.

Since then, one sentence has lived in women’s soccer infamy: “There’s no doubt in my mind I would’ve made those saves.” After Brazil won 4-0, Solo walked over to an interviewer in the mixed zone, over the objections of US Soccer PR staff, and ripped the decision to bench her. The reasoning was murky – Ryan’s public line at the time was about goalkeeping styles, but he later said Solo had broken several team rules off the field. Before a World Cup semi-final against Brazil, coach Greg Ryan abruptly benched Solo in favor of Briana Scurry, the accomplished but rusty back-up goalkeeper. New York Times writer Jeré Longman summed it up in his chronicle of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, The Girls of Summer: “No team is without its internal tensions, and the American women had distinct groupings of age and alma mater, but private cliques never became public nuisances.”īy 2007, the nuisances were public. Four years ago, Hope Solo’s Solo: A Memoir of Hope swung the first sledgehammer at the team’s image, which had been built up through years of seeing Mia Hamm deflect praise upon her team-mates and plenty of commercials portraying the team as a fun-loving bunch of young women with ponytails and cute nicknames.Īny drama had been hidden behind the omerta of the locker room.

Megan rapinoe memoir