Bronze, Lucy (1991- )

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    Kerr Scored. The Crowd Roared. But England Wasn’t Done.

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    England advanced to its first World Cup final by leaning on the experience and the resilience of a champion.The entire continent of Australia had been waiting not so patiently for the moment that finally arrived in the 63rd minute of Wednesday night’s Women’s World Cup semifinal between Australia and England.Collecting the ball in her own half and crossing the midfield line, Sam Kerr was off. Head down, driving forward, she took a couple of quick dribbles, then a few more, then nudged the ball ahead of her right foot and fired. Her shot, struck hard and high from just outside the penalty area, soared past the reach of England goalkeeper Mary Earps.Kerr had wheeled away in celebration by then, even before the ball had settled into the net, and the home crowd inside Stadium Australia let out a deafening and sustained roar. Australia had pulled even with England, and for the first time in the match, it seemed as if the English might be on the ropes.THAT’S ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT 🤩GOLAZOOO SAM KERR 🇦🇺 pic.twitter.com/Gnts261nW2— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) August 16, 2023
    Maybe a previous version of the team would have been. But this England team scored eight minutes later to pull back ahead, and then added a third goal in the 86th minute. It had, in less than half an hour, turned a tenuous moment into its most dominant finish of this tournament, a 3-1 victory over Australia that sent the Lionesses to their first World Cup final, where they will face Spain on Sunday.“We’ve got that in this team,” England defender Lucy Bronze said. “We’ve got resilience. We’ve got an inner belief that, I think, is bigger and better than we have ever had previously.”Bronze was part of the England squads that lost in the World Cup semifinals in 2015 and 2019, disappointments that she has admitted have lingered with her. Getting over that hump in this tournament was hardly a linear path, even after England won the European Championship last year on home soil.England arrived at the World Cup last month without three of its top players, all sidelined with knee injuries, and it has played its past two games without its initial breakout star here, midfielder Lauren James, who served a two-game suspension for stamping on a Nigerian player in the round of 16.Coach Sarina Wiegman also pointed out that her players have faced added attention since winning the Euros, which can bring new challenges and absolutely brings heightened expectations. On Wednesday, though, England looked all the better for that experience — a seasoned team that thrived, rather than crumbled, under pressure.Australia’s Mackenzie Arnold was beaten three times on Wednesday.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters“I don’t think anything fazes us,” said midfielder Ella Toone, who scored England’s first goal, before halftime. “We’ve faced a lot of challenges this tournament that we’ve just got on with and got through.”Indeed, a theme of this tournament has been England’s finding a way to win, even as it has taken a while to find the dominant form many had expected. In their early matches, the Lionesses relied on strong defense and Earps’s steady goalkeeping as they struggled to score. Against Australia, though, it was their goals that silenced an expectant home crowd.Having the stadium backing the other team was nothing new, of course. Bronze referred back to England’s 2-1 quarterfinal win against Colombia, when the Lionesses fell into an early deficit in front of another crowd that also heavily favored their opponent. The visceral release inside the stadium after Kerr’s goal was at a different level. While those kinds of moments are expected from Kerr — even if she was not entirely healthy coming off her calf injury — defender Jess Carter said England’s back line was still disappointed to have allowed her goal, frustrated because they felt as if they should have handled it better.The next few minutes felt a little bit shaky, Wiegman admitted, as the replays of the goal on the stadium video screens wound up the fans again and the noise continued to reverberate. Kerr got another chance on a header, and then another. Earps appeared to signal to her teammates to settle down. The only way through, England knew, was to stick to the game plan, and hold its nerve.“I thought we did really well, but we have done that really well the whole tournament so far,” Wiegman said. “And then, of course, it didn’t take that long before we scored a second goal. And that helps.”Alessia Russo sensed her clinching goal was in even before it crossed the line.Mark Baker/Associated PressThat may be the quiet strength of these England players: They have won in different ways this tournament, changing their tactics to suit their opponents, adapting on the fly when those tactics aren’t working, holding teams off until someone, somehow, conjures a goal. But it was the way they responded to Kerr’s equalizer that demonstrated above all else why they will be playing in the World Cup final.Forward Lauren Hemp scored in the 71st minute, off a long and searching pass by Millie Bright, England’s captain. Fifteen minutes after that, Alessia Russo delivered the final blow: a low right-footed shot after a driving run up the center by Hemp.Just as Kerr had done, Russo wheeled away to start her celebration even before the ball had settled into the net. She knew, England knew, the job was done, and the final beckoned. On the bench, Wiegman finally let herself relax.“We are not,” she thought, “going to give this away anymore.” More

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      ‘Everyone Expects Us to Win’: England Tries to Live in the Now

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      Injuries weakened the Lionesses, and recent results have raised eyebrows. But the players and their coach say it takes a lot to shake a champion.Sarina Wiegman likes to look on the bright side of things. In April, England’s 30-match unbeaten run was ended with a 2-0 loss to Australia. But Wiegman, the team’s Dutch coach, deliberately focused on 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 explained a few weeks later during an interview at England’s training facility in St. George’s Park. “It has, most of all, showed us the urgency to do some things better.”It is an interesting time for the England women’s team, which arrives at the Women’s World Cup as one of the tournament favorites but also in perhaps its most uncertain state after two years of largely smooth sailing under Wiegman.The Lionesses are the champions of Europe, a triumph claimed on home soil last year that has precipitated a sea change for women’s soccer in England. Never-seen-before viewing figures. Record attendances and a vibrant domestic league. Victories in the past year over the reigning World Cup champion (the United States) as well as World Cup contenders like Germany, Sweden and Spain. And ever-rising expectations that this is just the start.England’s celebrations after their Euros win.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via Shutterstock“With this England team,” Wiegman said, “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 title, what began as the loss of one key starter to injury, striker Beth Mead, has become three. Midfielder Fran Kirby will miss the World Cup, too, after having surgery on her knee. Leah Williamson, who captained England as it conquered, has, like Mead, torn a knee ligament. Her replacement captain, defender Millie Bright, has only recently recovered from a knee injury of her own, and was a question mark when the team boarded its flight to Australia.Recent results have proved similarly worrisome: The loss to Australia was followed by a lackluster 0-0 draw against Portugal, a game in which a frustrated England unable to convert any of its 23 attempts on goal. A goalless draw in a behind-closed-doors friendly against Canada, England’s last game before the World Cup, was the team’s third straight scoreless performance.Yet Wiegman remains pragmatic and steadfast. Again and again in her recent interview, she returned to the same questions that have become touchstones for her and her team: “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 important, 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.”England Coach Sarina Wiegman led the Netherlands to the 2019 final. Now she hopes to do the same with England.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPlayers, of course, have their own ambitions.“We’ve all got dreams, and we all want to win,” forward Lauren Hemp said. “We’ll see how the tournament goes. But it’s something that we’re striving toward 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 in 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 said. “Anything can happen in a World Cup.”Wiegman harbors her own hopes for the squad. “We have high expectations, 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 collision with the United States, or Germany, or anyone else if England can navigate deep into the knockout stages.“Let’s first see, ‘OK, we want to get out of the group stage,’” 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.” More

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      Is Euro 2022 the Payoff for England’s Women’s Soccer Play?

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      At least a half-dozen nations will arrive at this summer’s European Championship thinking they can lift the trophy. But the pressure to win might be the highest on the host nation.BURTON-ON-TRENT, England — It was only 13 years ago, England defender Lucy Bronze figures as she scrolls through her memories, when she needed to pack bags in a supermarket to earn the money she needed for her bus fare to Derby, where she and her Sunderland teammates were to play in the Women’s F.A. Cup Final. It was only a couple of years after that when she was still juggling her nascent career at Everton with a job at Domino’s Pizza.Fast forward to 2022. The rapid rise of women’s soccer in England, and in much of western Europe, is such that Bronze and nearly every other top professional waved goodbye to those kinds of side jobs long ago. Today, Bronze is widely recognized as one of the best women’s players in the world: a three-time Champions League winner, Barcelona’s star summer signing and a key member of an England team that harbors ambitions of winning this month’s European Women’s Championship.“Here we are, in 2022, and players get like helicopters to do appearances,” Bronze, 30, said after an England training session in June. “Do you know what I mean? It’s gone so far, so quickly, and I don’t think anyone could have forecast how huge it was going to be.”England’s Beth Mead and Lauren Hemp during a recent rout of the Netherlands in a friendly.Molly Darlington/Action Images Via ReutersThe do-you-know-what-I-mean moments come quickly in women’s soccer these days. Record-setting attendances. Landmark television agreements. Equal-pay milestones. In 2022, a supermarket chain is far more likely to sponsor an England player than to employ one.That makes the start of this summer’s Women’s Euros, a three-and-a-half-week tournament that opens with the host England’s match against Austria on Wednesday night, another pivotal moment for the game experiencing a surge in both interest and investment.At least a half-dozen nations will arrive in England’s stadiums thinking they can lift the trophy after the final on July 31. But the pressure to do so might be the highest on the host nation, which continues to pump millions of dollars into the sport but has yet to win a major women’s trophy.Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United, will host England’s opening match against Austria on Wednesday. The game is sold out.Carl Recine/Action Images Via ReutersThe stakes for England are high: It will roll into the tournament fresh off lopsided victories over three other tournament participants — Belgium (3-0), the Netherlands (5-1) and Switzerland (4-0) — and eager to build on a semifinal run at the last World Cup, with the next one now just a year away. The Lionesses, as England’s team is known, have not lost a match since Sarina Wiegman took over as their coach in September.That means there is no hiding from the expectations. The faces of England players now adorn billboards in shopping centers and packaging on store shelves. The BBC will air every one of the tournament’s games on its channels or (for a few simultaneous kickoffs) its streaming platform. And England’s three group-stage matches are already sold out.More than 500,000 tickets to the tournament have been sold, guaranteeing the tournament’s attendance will more than double that of its last iteration, in 2017 in the Netherlands. The bulk of those who turn out to cheer England will be expecting the host nation to set a new standard.That could be why Wiegman has made an effort to moderate expectations — “I think there are many favorites for this tournament,” she said recently. “We are one of them.” — even as England’s soccer federation as leaned in on “the pride, the responsibility and the privilege” of the team’s cause.Still, her players know the game’s sudden growth, as well as the chance to play a major tournament on home soil, has placed them in a pivotal moment.“I didn’t really have a female role model growing up in terms of football, so I think it’s massive for that,” England midfielder Keira Walsh, 25, who plays for Manchester City, said of having the Euros on home soil. “But not just for young girls — I think for young boys, they can see the women playing in the big stadiums with sellout crowds at a home tournament. I think it’s only going to grow respect for the game in that way as well.”The tournament comes during an exciting time for women’s soccer in Europe. Its 16-team lineup features some of the world’s most talented squads, including Sweden, currently ranked second in the world; the Netherlands, a World Cup finalist three years ago; Germany, an eight-time European champion; and Spain, which boasts a talented team but, now, not Alexia Putellas, the reigning world player of the year, who tore a knee ligament in training on Tuesday). Norway is bolstered by the return of Ada Hegerberg, and France by the core of that country’s dominant club teams, Olympique Lyonnais and Paris St.-Germain.It is England, though, that may face the highest expectations to deliver.Historic investments by the country’s biggest clubs in the Women’s Super League, England’s top domestic competition, have attracted some of the world’s best players, produced new revenue streams and lifted the standard of play for a new generation of England stars. All but one member of England’s 23-player Euro squad played in the W.S.L. last season, including the veterans Bronze and Ellen White and rising talents such as Walsh and Lauren Hemp.”I don’t think anyone could have forecast how huge it was going to be,” England defender Lucy Bronze said of the growth of the women’s game in Europe.Molly Darlington/Action Images Via Reuters“We’ve seen, over the years, how much the women’s game has grown,” said Hemp, 21, who this year was honored as England’s best young women’s player for a record fourth time. “I think having this home tournament is only going to help it grow even more.”For all the gains, though, players, even the best ones, know there is still a long way to go. The investments in the W.S.L. remain a fraction of the money poured into the men’s game in Europe, and the salaries, television deals and prize money — while significantly improved — still qualify as a rounding error when compared with the men’s paydays.UEFA, the governing body for European soccer, has faced criticism over its choices of stadiums in the group stages, with Iceland’s Sara Björk Gunnarsdottir branding the use of Manchester City’s Academy Stadium, with a tournament capacity of 4,700, as “disrespectful.” And a survey of 2,000 male soccer fans in Britain published earlier this year found that two-thirds had “openly misogynistic attitudes” toward women’s sports, irrespective of age.Still, for veterans like Bronze, the tournament shows how far the women’s game has come and presents an opportunity to raise its profile even more. The new crop of young players she sees at training every day, she said, exhibit a fearlessness that she didn’t have at their age and symbolize a future — for themselves and for England — that could be even brighter.“I look at some of the players now, who maybe haven’t been to a tournament, and I think, ‘Oh, God, when I was you, I was panicking a bit more,’” Bronze said. “But they all seem a little bit more calm.” More