rkomar

She's good enough for the NC Courage, who are among the best women's soccer teams in the world. Is Herdman clouding their thoughts, too?

Wow! Zerboni is dropped from the list and traded to Sky Blue. I guess it's old news, but I hadn't heard of it.

Woohoo! I bought a year's subscription with OneSoccer to watch the WCOQ, so the more new stuff to watch the rest of the year, the better.

Oh my gawd. We win on the strength of one goal that was a sitter and almost missed. That was a barely deserved win.

I actually got to watch about 25 minutes on OneSoccer before it conked out on me. Hopefully they'll have the full game up on replay later. Time to watch the Leafs.

It wasn't just her. The Mexican players were beating every Canadian player to the ball for most of the game. It looked like our players weren't that interested in giving 100% on each play. That doesn't sound good, but it paid off towards the end of the match, where we dominated possession because the Mexicans were too pooped out to compete anymore. It will be interesting to see how much the Mexicans have left in the tank for their final game against the Americans. I got the impression that the Mexican plan was to go full throttle at the beginning to get an early goal, and maybe batten down the hatches after that. Our defensive play was good enough to stymie that plan, and with our early goals, we were able to coast towards victory.

For some reason, Jamaica sat back and didn't really press the Canadian players during the game. That is always going to make our players look good, because they have plenty of time to make their plays. So, I don't think you should rank Canadian players based on how good some of them looked in that game. It wasn't a good test.

I think you're not appreciating the technical skill of the Americans' top team. Just because they are more athletic doesn't mean they aren't as skilled. That's what's keeping them on top of the world. It's true that the levels below them (including NWSL) lean towards athleticism over skill, but the cream of the crop has both.

We've been hearing for a long time about how the Americans will be bitten by their style of play being eclipsed by the European one. And yet, there they are at number one in the world, still the favourite for winning each World Cup. The European style may be more pleasing to watch for soccer purists, but I don't think that it has yet been proven that it is the way to win women's soccer games. It would be interesting to figure out why the women's game is different from the men's game that way. That said, I'm all for our players getting on to teams where they aren't second class citizens. The NWSL seems fine for our established players, but doesn't seem to be as good for our developing players. Whether the European style is better or not, European clubs seem to be the better place to get skills and experience.

I watched the Mexico/Jamaica game, and it was a lot closer than I had anticipated. Mexico had more skill on the ball, but it was held in check by Jamaica's athleticism and determination. I couldn't really tell whether Mexico was worse than I expected or Jamaica better. The former is good for team Canada's prospects in the group, while the latter is bad. I think that if tomorrow's game between Canada and Jamaica is close, I'll be sweating bullets during the final group game against Mexico.

I know that Bianca St. Georges got drafted by the Chicago Red Stars last year, but I don't see her on the First or Reserve rosters on their website. Has she been dropped by the team, or is there somewhere else draft picks can end up for development?

It's all opinion and feelings; there's no pressing reason to be as "correct" as possible in your rankings. Next time, join the poll and cheer for your favourites. The more the merrier.

Activity here has been going down for a while even before that. I'm not sure why, but it looks like people just don't care as much about women's soccer anymore. For example, interest in the NWSL seems to have dropped off a cliff around here. To be fair, interest in the MLS seems to also have waned judging by the drop in posts in that forum, too. Maybe there's some general influence at work here?

I'm not sure if anyone really stood out this year, so it's making it hard for me to decide. I'll go with success as the differentiator. 1 Steph Labbe (NWSL champion, usually the starting goalkeeper) 2 Kadeisha Buchanan (UEFA champion, not always playing) 3 Jessie Fleming (NCAA semifinals) Sinclair would normally have got a vote from me, but she made slow headway this year in her quest to surpass the all-time international goals record, so I'm not including her in my top three. P.S. I hope we aren't supposed to vote just based on performance on Team Canada.

UCLA were bested by Stanford 4-1 in the tournament semifinals. Judging by the box score, they were out-shot by a wide margin. Too bad for Fleming and the Bruins, but no NCAA championship title for her. It will be interesting to see what comes next for her. She seems to be excelling academically, and I wonder if her sports career will have to mesh with her engineering career over the next while?