Sarina Wiegman likes to seem at the vivid aspect of items. In April, England’s 30-match unbeaten run used to be ended with a 2–0 loss to Australia. But Wiegman, the group’s Dutch trainer, intentionally targeted at the positives.
“It sounds really strange, and you always want to win, but I think this defeat also brought us so many learning lessons,” she defined a couple of weeks later all the way through an interview at England’s coaching facility in St. To set up George’s Park. “It has, most of all, shown us the urgency to do some things better.”
It is an engaging time for the England ladies’s group, which arrives on the Women’s World Cup as some of the match favorites but additionally in in all probability its maximum unsure state after two years of in large part easy crusing beneath Wiegman.
The Lionesses are the champions of Europe, a triumph claimed on house soil ultimate 12 months that has induced a sea trade for ladies’s football in England. Never-seen-before viewing figures. Record attendances and a colourful home league. Victories previously 12 months over the reigning World Cup champion (the United States) in addition to World Cup contenders like Germany, Sweden and Spain. And ever-rising expectancies that that is only the start.
“With this England team,” Wiegman mentioned, “everyone expects us to win.”
But the England that enters this World Cup is, arguably, a weakened champion. In the months since claiming its European identify, what started because the lack of one key starter to damage, striker Beth Mead, has transform 3. Midfielder Fran Kirby will pass over the World Cup, too, after having surgical procedure on her knee. Leah Williamson, who captained England because it conquered, has, like Mead, torn a knee ligament. Her substitute captain, defender Millie Bright, has simplest just lately recovered from a knee damage of her personal, and used to be a query mark when the group boarded its flight to Australia.
Recent effects have proved in a similar way worrisome: The loss to Australia used to be adopted by way of a lackluster 0-0 draw towards Portugal, a recreation through which a pissed off England used to be not able to transform any of its 23 makes an attempt on objective. A goalless attract a behind-closed-doors pleasant towards Canada, England’s ultimate recreation earlier than the World Cup, used to be the group’s 3rd instantly scoreless efficiency.
Yet Wiegman stays pragmatic and steadfast. Again and once more in her contemporary interview, she returned to the similar questions that experience transform touchstones for her and her group: “What do we want to do? How do we want to play? What are the roles and the tasks in the team?
She has insisted on a game-by-game approach, and communicated to her players that tactics and, perhaps more importantly, minutes will be decided on a day-to-day basis. That fluidity, Wiegman said, has its own motivating value, offering “opportunities for other players to play, to take responsibility, and to show who they are.”
“That’s why we then come back to: ‘OK, this is our next game’,” she said. “And then we’re in the now.”
Players, of course, have their own ambitions.
“We’ve all got dreams, and we all want to win,” mentioned ahead Lauren Hemp. “We’ll see how the tournament goes. But it’s something that we’re striving towards obviously, coming off the back of the championships and winning the Euros. It makes you hungry to want to win more.
The 22-year-old Manchester City defender Esme Morgan is among the new faces vying for game time. “That’s really been emphasized, to be honest, that there’s no set places in the squad,” she said after going 90 minutes into the draw against Portugal. “There’s so much competition in every position across the pitch. Really in training you can see that: The standard is so, so high.”
Lucy Bronze, one of the team’s most senior players, saw her own history as a guide. “I went into 2015 as a young player not expecting to play much and I ended up playing in every single game, scoring goals, and I forced myself into the spotlight and broke out a little bit,” she mentioned. “Anything can happen in a World Cup.”
Wiegman harbors her own hopes for the squad. “We have top expectancies, too,” she said. But true to her instructions, she is staying in the now. She is not interested in discussing a potential rematch against Australia in the round of 16, or a possible clash with the United States, or Germany, or anyone else if England can navigate deep into the knockout stages.
“Let’s first see, ‘OK, we need to get out of the gang level,'” she said. “Then you come to the next stage and we see who is in front of us. It’s going to be very tough. And if we would get to the final, hopefully we do.
“It really doesn’t matter who’s in front of us. You just want to win every game.