U.S. Soccer officials informed us that this game will not be played at approximately nine this evening.
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U.S. Soccer canceled the World Cup winners’ friendly against Trinidad and Tobago in Hawaii on Sunday, after Alex Morgan and head coach Jill Ellis railed against the state of the field at Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium.
Players have protested playing on artificial turf fields for years, citing bad ball bounces, painful turf burn and delayed recovery time for injuries.
Now Laura Vecsey with Fox Soccer is reporting that the USWNT has decided not to play in light of the risky field conditions. And, according to Foudy, the field at Aloha stadium in Honolulu wasn’t inspected before the match.
And despite their clear negligence in this case, U.S. Soccer does care if their players get hurt. The team will be missing Rapinoe as it looks to qualify for the Olympics in February.
This is the bare minimum, though.
Megan Rapinoe is now out with a torn ACL.
The scheduled match was part of the team’s 2015 Victory Tour and would have been the first women’s global match in Hawaii. Based on players’ tweets, this confrontation between players and federation has been building up for some time and has finally boiled over with both practice field and the game field considered sub-standard.
Midfielder Carli Lloyd said she anxious about potential injuries.
And they’re not done yet. The team practiced at the Waipio Peninsula Soccer Stadium yesterday, and signed autographs afterward for about a thousand people who were there for youth or club games.
For winning the World Cup the USWNT only received $2 million in prize money, compared to the $35 million the German men were awarded for winning the men’s World Cup previous year.
NFL spokesman Michael Signora told PFT via email that the league will make sure that the playing surface is safe for the Pro Bowl. “So, when you play in a tight space, obviously there’s more contact”.
That lawsuit was killed through stall tactics by FIFA’s lawyers and intimidation tactics by individual FAs, but it was very clearly one that had merit, and one that made players’ feelings on the issue well known.
The cancellation of the game, which would have been the seventh on the team’s 10-game World Cup victory tour, is the latest in a series of events that highlight the disparities between men’s and women’s soccer in the U.S. It’s reasonable to infer that they did it because they didn’t care what the players thought.
“I think our fans can read between the lines and see it’s not about one game, it’s a matter of equity in all conditions”, Solo said.
Team members would later meet the fans who heard about the unannounced session for photos and autographs.
In explaining their decision to sit out Sunday’s game, the players wrote: “Soccer is our job”.
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Checking fields is the absolute least U.S. Soccer can do for these players.
