US goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher remained solitary holding the ball and breathing in profoundly, her eyes wide in dismay, as Sweden's players hustled pitchside to frame a cheerful load of yellow on the grass. A portion of her partners were in tears. "Feels like a terrible dream," Alex Morgan would later tell Fox Sports.

The match was finished, the US was crushed by Sweden on punishments in the last 16, and gone were the fantasies about leaving a mark on the world. The group that had made the way for all others had been gotten. This was a top-down reorganizing in ladies' soccer.


It isn't so much that the US has never lost a ladies' soccer match, however, it last endured a rout at a World Cup quite a while back and has never been taken out of the competition at such a beginning phase.

Maybe, in time, even those in the US will come to see this misfortune as a positive improvement for the ladies' down on the grounds that no game or rivalry flourishes in an authority.


Three of the four previous World Cup victors are at this point not in that frame of mind, while the purported longshots have flourished. As the US group itself posted via virtual entertainment after the match, "The current year's Ladies' Reality Cup is a demonstration of the development of ladies' soccer on a worldwide scale … "