In the absence of much else to watch last night I caught most of the semi-final between USA and England. Somehow, I actually managed to miss all three goals, but saw almost all of the rest of it. It was actually quite an interesting match-up: those two had been by far the best two teams I'd seen in the tournament to date. (I should note that I'd not seen much of France and hadn't seen anything of Germany's performances.)
I actually found it quite difficult to decide who to root for. On the one hand, the USA are busy running honest-to-goodness concentration camps, so that kind of rules them out. On the other hand, England are busily dragging us out of the EU against our will, so that rules them out. Plus, the winners of yesterday's match were (and are) heavy favourites for the final, and if England were to win the World Cup they'd never let us hear the end of it, so there's that. (Seriously, in the France/Korea match that started the tournament, the commentators managed a whole 17 seconds before bringing up 1966. Do they really not understand how utterly pathetic that is?) On balance, I've decided to support whoever wins the second semi-final tonight.
Anyway...
It was a really good match. When the two best teams in a tournament beat there's always a fear that they'll just cancel each other out, and in a semi-final there's always a fear that both teams will play not to lose the game. Either way, that can lead to a game that just sucks... and that very definitely wasn't the case here.
On balance, the USA were the better team and deserved to win it. That said, they really should have worked harder to get a third (and subsequent) goal, rather than spending so much time just trying to hold on to their lead - a strategy that so very nearly backfired on them twice.
The penalty decision looked rather soft, but was probably just about right. The penalty itself was woeful. That said, looking at the replay I'm pretty sure it should have been retaken - the rule is that when the ball is kicked the keeper must have part of one foot on or above the line, and it looked very much like Naeher had one foot in front and one behind that line (the latter, incidentally, is specifically called out as not being allowed). In other words, England lost out because the refereeing team didn't apply the same rule that was incorrectly used to knock Scotland out.
(Incidentally, I've reconsidered my position on VAR in light of some of the later matches in the tournament. While I still think it's a fine idea, I do think these "VAR Reviews" have to go - the long pauses in the game while a team analyse events over and over again are just lethal to the game. It really needs to be an instant thing - have the VAR team watching the match and only flag things up if they seem them live. That is, get rid of the replays, and get rid of the ref going over the have a look. And, yes, accept that that means that things won't be 100% perfect... if for no other reason that they're not going to be 100% perfect anyway.)
As for where we go from here, to be honest I think things are likely to carry on as they are for the foreseeable future. I suspect Scotland have already given their best ever performance at a World Cup, because as time goes on more and more nations will jump into women's football, will apply greater time and resources than we do, and so we'll stand still while everyone races past us. I suspect England's future is to continue to be one of the best teams there, but probably never the best. So they're probably hoping for a near-repeat of either this year or last, where England get to their semi-final and hope to cause an upset while in the other half of the draw they hope an upset has taken out most of the other good teams. And I suspect the USA will dominate the game for a very long time to come, possibly even on a permanent basis.
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