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      Twists and Turns: A World Cup Fitness Coach Explains Pregame Warm-Ups

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      In the final hour before a game, teams’ activities can look as random as recess at the local elementary school. But there is order in the chaos.DOHA, Qatar — Watching players perform their pregame warm-ups on the field is one of the more delightful World Cup rituals. They’re skipping, they’re lunging, they’re sashaying. They’re stretching and sprinting. Some are running drills or rocketing balls at goals (or goalkeepers). Others are playing what looks like backyard keep-away, firing one-touch passes around a small circle as two players in the middle dodge and dart to try to win the ball.It can look as random as recess at the local elementary school (albeit if the kids were professional athletes), but there is organization in the chaos.To help us understand what is going on, we turned to Andrew Clark, the high-performance coordinator for Australia’s team, known as the Socceroos. (Currently No. 38 in the FIFA rankings, the team exceeded expectations by placing second in Group D; it will play Argentina on Saturday in the first knockout round.)Clark talked us through the importance of finding the sweet spot between too little and too much pregame preparation, and how to keep the players’ nerves from shredding before the match.This interview has been edited and condensed.What is the goal of the warm-up?The purpose of a warm-up is to prepare the players to perform in the most efficient way, to get them 100 percent ready physically and mentally for the match. There’s a whole lot of detail underneath that of raising body temperature, turning on decision-making and performing the sort of actions that are going to be required in a game. But we have to make sure that we don’t overdo it. We don’t want to overload the players and take away energy that’s needed for the match.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockDan Mullan/Getty ImagesMatthias Hangst/Getty ImagesWhy can’t you just do the exercises out of sight, inside the stadium?You want to give the players a sense of what they’re about to walk into. Little things like the wind, the temperature, how wet the grass is, what it feels like, the speed of the pitch. Where are the shadows on the field? Also, just being there and feeling the atmosphere in the stadium gives them energy and takes away a bit of their anxiety.All the players — the starting lineup as well as the substitutes — are out there, but they’re doing different things.We’ve got 26 players, but only 11 players can play, plus five players off the bench. For the players on the bench, we’re trying to make sure they’re ready in case they’re called at short notice during the match. But they’re warming up 50 minutes before kickoff, and it might be nearly two hours before they enter the field. What we need is basically just to make sure their systems are starting to turn on, their core temperature is up, their spine is activated.And then those players will go off and do something more relaxed, like the little circle groups that you see. If you push them too hard, they can go over the top, and you can actually kill their performance. So it’s very important that we keep them calm and relaxed.In a tournament situation, it’s a constant struggle to try to expose the players who aren’t playing in the matches to enough training. All of them have put in all the work to get to this point. And emotionally it’s difficult. They’re not getting the same gratification as the guy who scores the winner. We work really hard to make sure that we don’t neglect them, that we give them the best opportunity when the time comes.Fabrizio Bensch/ReutersWhat about the starting players?They’re going through a process of turning their body on and slowly working through the dynamic ranges of motion that they’ll be required to perform in the match. Then they’ll do some maximum-velocity type activities.And then we go into a game-based situation where it becomes spatial and decision making. Usually it’s some sort of position game — 5 versus 5, plus one spare player, or 4 versus 4, plus 3. We want to make sure they’re starting to make decisions similar to what they’re doing in the game.What about when they seem to be all doing different things?After that, you start to see things that are specific to certain players. Some players are finishing on goal, some players are crossing. We have our own ideas, but we take guidance from what a player needs in those last few minutes. We know what a central defender needs; we know what a midfielder needs, and we design activities that allow them to do that.The last thing we do is come together and do something as explosive as possible just to finish off. It’s called post-activation potentiation, or PAP, and it involves an excitation of the neuromuscular system. They walk into the changing room fully activated, fully charged and ready to start the game.What do they do back in the locker room, after the warm-up but before the game begins?There’s still 15 minutes to the match, so the challenge for a player is filling that 15-minute gap. It’s a chance to refuel, it’s a chance to go through some final checks, put their pads on, say a few words.Matthias Hangst/Getty ImagesWhat if they’re super-nervous — or not nervous enough?Once we’re spread out on the field, the stadium swallows up communication, so this is the time everyone can talk. You have to understand how they’re feeling, whether they need a rocket or whether, OK, there’s a lot of anxiety in this group, we need to be very calm. They can be either overstimulated or under-stimulated, and we try to balance that out, to get back to the midpoint where people are nice and stable and ready to perform their best.There’s less pressure on you than on teams from places like Argentina and Brazil. Does that make it any easier?Because of the weight of expectation placed on them, other teams can be overly anxious about needing to beat us. We see that as an opportunity. We prey on their anxiety. More

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      The U.S. World Cup Team Is Notably Diverse, but the Pipeline Needs Help

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      In some ways, things haven’t changed much in American soccer.You may well have never heard of him, but Desmond Armstrong is a pioneer. In 1990, he became the first African American to represent the United States in a World Cup game.Never mind that the United States, then returning to the World Cup after a four-decade hiatus, was humbled by Czechoslovakia in a 5-1 loss. By starting as a defender for the Americans that June day in Italy, Armstrong signaled that his home country could produce elite players who weren’t white.Sadly, with a few exceptions, his trailblazing role did not get much attention in the press that day. Nor did it in the run-up to the tournament, or when the American team played Italy to a near draw in group stage play days later. Another talented Black player, Jimmy Banks, also broke ground on the 1990 U.S. team, subbing in for his initial action during the game against the Czechs. Banks’s part as a breaker of norms was similarly overlooked.Color Armstrong unsurprised.“The disregard was commonplace from the media back then,” Armstrong told me this week when we discussed the omissions. He is 58 now, still fit and trim, and running a grass roots youth soccer club in Nashville.“It was sort of like, Jimmy and I are on the team, but aside from the team making history since the U.S. hadn’t been in the Cup in 40 years, we are also making history,” he said. “It’s just that what we were doing was something that didn’t go acknowledged by many people.”“We were recognized as a footnote, if at all.”Armstrong, right, vying for the ball during the FIFA World Cup match between Italy and the United States in 1990.Chris Smith/Popperfoto via Getty ImagesArmstrong and Banks, who died in 2019 after battling pancreatic cancer, deserve our acknowledgment, respect and appreciation.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      The Giant World Cup Rookie and an Enduring Dutch Mystery

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      The Netherlands is Europe’s most reliable talent factory. Unless you need a goalkeeper.DOHA, Qatar — As they sat around the dinner table, Andries Noppert’s family raised the question as gently and as kindly as they could.He had been trying to make it as a professional soccer player for more than a decade. At 6 feet 8 inches, he had the physical gifts, and nobody would question his determination, his drive. But he was 26 now, and if everyone was completely honest, it did not seem to be working out. He had been at four clubs, and hardly played for any of them. He had made barely more than a dozen appearances in seven years.The constant disappointment, the ongoing frustration, was taking its toll, and that was before anyone even mentioned his misfortune with injury. Perhaps, Noppert’s parents suggested, it might be time to try something else. His wife wondered if a career in the police force might provide a more reliable salary for their young family.Two years on from that attempted intervention, Noppert finds himself at the World Cup, and not as a mere observer. He has barely played 50 senior games as a professional, but on Saturday he is almost certain to start in goal for the Netherlands in its round of 16 match against the United States. It is, as Noppert himself has put it, more than a little “bizarre.”His own interpretation of his unusual career arc — the long, slow burn, followed by the sudden and unexpected ignition — is that his progress was slowed not only by a succession of injuries but by his own failure to grasp his talent. “I may have made the wrong choices at times,” he has said.It is an assessment reinforced by those who have worked with him. Noppert started out at Heerenveen, his local team, before spells at NAC Breda, the Italian side Foggia, Dordrecht back in the Netherlands and, after he rejected his family’s attempts to persuade him to go into law enforcement, Go Ahead Eagles.It was only at the latter that he found regular playing time. Until then, he had been “at peace with being second choice,” according to Kees van Wonderen, who coached him at Go Ahead Eagles and then, last summer, returned him to Heerenveen. Noppert “lacked sharpness and hunger,” he said.Nopport with his children after a training session last week. His family once tried to persuade him to give up on soccer as a career.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Let’s just say that Andries didn’t make it hard to not pick him,” he said.Noppert’s individual case, then, might be filed in the same category as all of the other heartening stories the World Cup unearths at quadrennial intervals: the heroes who emerge from nowhere, the players seeking redemption, the sudden superstars.His story, though, does not exist in isolation. It is part of a pattern, and one that, from a Dutch point of view, is less touching and more troubling. A couple of years after he might have given up on his career, Noppert is at the World Cup not only because of his determination, his refusal to give in, but because the Netherlands cannot produce goalkeepers.There is, of course, one noteworthy exception: Edwin van der Sar, formerly of Ajax, Juventus and Manchester United. And there have been, over the years, a trickle of perfectly respectable, though hardly awe-inspiring, goalkeepers who have won the Dutch colors: Hans van Breukelen, Ed de Goey, Jasper Cillessen.The supply, though, has not been steady enough to dispel the impression that the Netherlands, a country that churns out some of the brightest young outfield talent on the planet at industrial volume, has a chronic blind spot between the posts.Noppert, after all, has been selected ahead of Justin Bijlow, who has spent only 18 months as Feyenoord’s first-choice goalkeeper, and Remko Pasveer, a 39-year-old who made his international debut this year. The reasons for that, as offered by Louis van Gaal, the Dutch coach, hardly amount to resounding praise.“He was in shape,” van Gaal said of Noppert. “We were impressed by how he played in the weeks prior to the World Cup. He only stopped the balls he could stop.”But then that, perhaps, is all that is necessary. After all, the pickings are distinctly slim. No major European team outside of Ajax employs a Dutch goalkeeper. Seven of the 18 teams in the Dutch top flight employ imported goalkeepers. Van Gaal has taken roughly a third of the qualified goalkeepers available to him to Qatar.The reasons for that veer from the loftily philosophical to the pragmatically economic, the former PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord goalkeeper Patrick Lodewijks told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant earlier this year. Lodewijks spent five years working with the country’s soccer federation as a goalkeeper coach.Noppert and the Netherlands can advance to the quarterfinals by beating the United States on Saturday.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesDutch teams invariably demand that their goalkeepers, as is the country’s tradition, possess the technical ability to take part in build-up play, he said, but it comes at the cost of neglecting the rather more rudimentary skills of saving shots and catching crosses.“The best goalkeeper in the Eredivisie is a German, Lars Unnerstall,” Lodewijks said last season. “A giant, top athlete, great reflexes. But he was second choice at PSV, because he couldn’t play soccer well.”The financial reality of Dutch soccer, meanwhile, discourages clubs from investing too much time in their goalkeepers. All Dutch teams are reliant on generating income from transfer fees — even Ajax, the richest and most powerful side in the Eredivisie, earned as much money in selling two players to Manchester United in a few weeks last summer as it does from all other revenue streams over the course of a year — and goalkeepers fetch significantly smaller fees than, for example, elfin attacking midfielders. The goalkeeper business is not a lucrative one.Lodewijks suggests the solution is a complete overhaul in how Dutch clubs think about the position: spending more time on dedicated training sessions, rather than focusing on how goalkeepers can be involved in general play; major teams sending the most promising prospects out on loan to smaller teams, where they may have rather more to do than watching on passively “as youth teams win big.”Until then, the position of Dutch goalkeeper will remain unusually fertile ground for feel-good stories like Noppert’s: a place for late bloomers and stray talents and prospective law enforcement officers.He does, at least, seem well-suited to such a rapid promotion. “He’s a real Frisian,” defender Virgil van Dijk said last week, referring to the part of the Netherlands where Noppert grew up, a place famed for its stoicism and straight-talking. (It is unclear how this differs from the rest of the country.) “He’s sober, but very direct. He’s a boy after my own heart.”Van Gaal, too, has taken heart from how unmoved Noppert was by the prospect of making his debut for his country at the World Cup. “He has the sort of personality that means he would not be too impressed by this championship,” he said. It would be a lot tougher, after all, being a policeman. More

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      How Japan’s Win Over Spain Knocked Germany Out of the World Cup

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      AL RAYYAN, Qatar — The 11 Japanese players on the field were fighting back every Spanish threat and counting every tick of the clock. The substitutes stood on the sideline, arms locked, ready to rush the field. The fans beat a drum, and it felt like a quickening heartbeat.The whistle blew, and Japan had done it: It had upset another European soccer heavyweight, turned its four-team group inside out, and advanced to the round of 16.And Spain, knowing the tiebreaker scenarios and tracking what was happening 30 miles away in a game between Germany and Costa Rica, breathed a collective sigh of relief. It, too, had advanced from Group E, even after a 2-1 defeat at Khalifa International Stadium.Germany won its match but lost its hope. The Germans, the 2014 World Cup champions, were stunningly eliminated from the tournament before the round of 16 for the second time in a row. This time, Germany was undone by its own middling play over three games and the ruthless cruelty of group-stage math.At halftime of Thursday’s Group E games, which were played simultaneously, it looked as if Germany and Spain were going to move on. Minutes later, it looked as if it would be Japan and Costa Rica, after each scored two quick goals to take second-half leads.None of it was certain, though, until the games ended about 40 minutes later, and almost at the same time.The dizzying in-game what-ifs reinforced a quadrennial truism: The simultaneous group-stage finales provide what might be the greatest drama of the tournament.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Referee Stéphanie Frappart Will Lead First All-Woman Team at World Cup

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      Some 92 years after the first World Cup game was held in Uruguay, Stéphanie Frappart is set to become the first woman to be the lead referee during a men’s match at the tournament. Frappart, a French referee, has been appointed to a refereeing crew of all women during a decisive group stage game between Costa Rica and Germany on Thursday.Frappart, 38, will lead alongside Neuza Back of Brazil and Mexico’s Karen Diaz Medina. It is a barrier-breaking moment which both coaches welcomed and suggested was overdue.“I trust her 100 percent,” Germany’s manager, Hansi Flick, said of Frappart’s appointment. “I think she deserves to be here due to her performance and achievements.”Costa Rica’s manager, Luis Fernando Suárez, said the same during his prematch news conference.“I am a great admirer of everything women have conquered,” he said. “And I like that they want to keep conquering things. And this is another step forward, especially in this sport, which is a very macho.”Frappart told French reporters she considered her selection as lead referee “a surprise.” Still, she has had a stellar career for nearly two decades. A native of Le Plessis-Bouchard, a remote town in the far north of the Paris region, she officiated her first game in 2003 at age 19 — a women’s match between the Henin-Beaumont F.C. and La Roche-sur-Yon. Within two decades, she was overseeing a Women’s World Cup final.Since then, she climbed the ladder like no woman before her, racking up accolades. In 2014, she became the first woman to be lead referee during a men’s Ligue 2 game, in France’s second division. She then refereed games in men’s Ligue 1, during international friendlies and in the Champions League.On Aug. 14, 2019, Frappart also became the first woman to referee the UEFA Super Cup between Chelsea and Liverpool. After the game, Jürgen Klopp, the Liverpool coach, praised her performance.“If we would have played like they whistled, then we would have won, 6-0,” he said.Frappart’s also refereed the Women’s World Cup final in 2019, when the United States beat the Netherlands to cap a tournament that was a major public forum for the U.S. team’s fight for equal pay and treatment from its national federation.Pierluigi Collina, the chairman of the FIFA referee committee who is known for being tough on colleagues, has high praise for Frappart. “I hope that there will be more Frapparts in the future and that this will no longer constitute an oddity or news story,” Collina told the Italian press in 2021. At the Globe Soccer Awards in 2019, Frappart won an award as best referee and Collina handed her the trophy.Frappart told French reporters that she was “aware” that her presence in the tournament is “going to inspire.” But she would prefer to let her whistle do the talking.“I don’t want to be judged differently because of my gender but because of my refereeing skills,” she said.In Qatar, Stephanie Frappart has already officiated as fourth referee for two matches during the group phase, when Mexico faced Poland and Portugal played Ghana. More

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      Pulisic Is Recovering but Still Uncertain on US vs Netherlands

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      DOHA, Qatar — Christian Pulisic was happy to talk about what happened leading up to the goal he scored on Tuesday that carried the United States into the round of 16 at the World Cup.He was happy to talk about the ride to the hospital after colliding with Iran’s goalie, about how during that journey he followed the rest of the game on a trainer’s cellphone, and about the chances — not 100 percent, he said Thursday — that he would be available to play when the United States faces the Netherlands on Saturday.What he was far less comfortable talking about, as he stared out into the faces of at least 100 journalists, were the details of where he had been injured. U.S. Soccer has labeled Pulisic’s injury a “pelvic contusion.” Asked by a reporter to clarify what that meant, Pulisic took a long pause.“I mean,” he said, “it’s a pelvic contusion, you know?” The pelvic bone, he added, “is there for a reason, and I hit it well.”The specifics hardly matter. What does matter, at least for the United States, is that Pulisic admitted he was not sure he would be physically capable of going through a full training session with his teammates Thursday, 48 hours before they play the biggest game of their lives.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      To Get the Best Perks at the World Cup, You Have to Be a V.V.I.P.

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      Every sports venue has its own tiered system of luxury. The World Cup in Qatar is providing a reminder that there is always a higher level.AL KHOR, Qatar — With its haughty aura of exclusivity, the red-carpeted, velvet-roped V.I.P. entrance at Al Bayt Stadium seems designed to inspire maximal awe and envy. As regular fans were herded through their gates at the England-United States game on Friday, the V.I.P. guests were welcomed by an exotic figure dressed as some sort of antelope, covered head to toe in shimmering golden squares.(When pressed on its identity, the figure, who was not supposed to speak, muttered under its breath: “Oryx.”)But this is the Qatar World Cup, where there is something even better than the V.I.P. entrance: the V.V.I.P. entrance.Not that it is available, or even fully visible, to you. Flanked by barriers and cut off from the normal road system, Al Bayt’s V.V.I.P. entrance is a sweeping thoroughfare on which the most important fans, starting with Qatar’s emir, who arrives by helicopter with his entourage and then hops into a Mercedes, are chauffeured directly into their special enclave in the stadium. That way, they are never required to interact with, or even occupy the same general space as, regular fans.Aat Al Thumama stadium, the most high-profile fans enter on a red carpet.Tasneem Alsultan for The New York TimesOn the way to Education City Stadium, drivers select a lane based on their V.I.P. status.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesEvery sports venue has its tiered system of luxury — the owner’s box, the business lounges, the special-access elevators, the ridiculously expensive seats, the even more ridiculously expensive seats. But at this year’s World Cup, the convergence of two entities awash in luxury and entitlement — Qatar, where all power and privilege flow from the emir, and FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, with its vast wealth and patronage network — provides a bracing reminder that there is always a more rarefied degree of exclusive.The main difference between the luxury and non-luxury seats at this year’s World Cup is alcohol. In a shock to fans (and to Budweiser, the official beer of the tournament since 1986), Qatar reversed itself and decreed just before the event began that the sale of alcoholic beer (indeed, alcohol of any kind) would be banned in and around the stadiums.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      The U.S. Cleared a Big World Cup Hurdle. The Knockout Round Poses Another.

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      The U.S. victory over Iran sent it to the round of 16, with a match against the Netherlands on Saturday. But the team already has much to be proud of.DOHA, Qatar — Those last few minutes, the ones in which everything the United States has worked for was close enough to touch, seemed to stretch on and on into the night. The clock refused to tick. There was always another attack to repel, another ball to clear, another scare to survive.Eight years since it last played a knockout game at the World Cup, four years since it was forced to endure the stinging humiliation of watching the tournament from home, the country’s men’s team was on the brink of laying the ghosts to rest. It held a slender, single-goal lead against Iran, thanks to the self-sacrificing courage of Christian Pulisic. That was enough. All it had to do was hold on.Ever since that night five years ago in Couva, Trinidad, when it had all gone wrong, the question has been whether the United States has sufficiently gifted players to compete with the game’s superpowers. The relative ability of Pulisic, Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie is pored over, their every flaw prized open, their every strength judged and weighed.Those last few minutes, though, were not about talent. They were, instead, the most thorough examination imaginable of Gregg Berhalter’s team’s poise, and composure, and grit. They were a test of nerve. It is to their immense credit that they passed and now have a meeting with the Netherlands on Saturday in the next round.Victory was not comfortable, not at all. There were moments when their hearts rose up into their mouths, moments when their legs seemed heavy and their minds weary, moments when they had to fight off the siren call of blind panic. But then, it could not be any other way. It would not be a test if it were easy.The U.S. held a slender, single-goal lead against Iran, thanks to the self-sacrificing courage of Christian Pulisic.Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis remains an intensely young team, one that has been designed at least in part with the next World Cup, four years away and (mostly) on home soil, in mind. That they weathered what is most likely the most stressful situation any of them have experienced is to their enormous credit.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More