Team Sweden’s coach free with words, frank with thoughts

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This article was published 11/06/2015 (4085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The most remarkable thing happens when Pia Sundhage settles down in front of a microphone, the media, the television cameras and the world at large. 

That incredible thing is simply this: The Swedish women’s soccer team head coach just… talks. She’s free with her words and frank with her thoughts.

So it was on Thursday afternoon, when Sundhage swept into the basement press conference room at Investors Group Field in advance of tonight’s FIFA Women’s World Cup match. The tilt will be Group D’s marquee event, a battle between Sundhage’s fifth-ranked squad and the juggernaut United States.

The Americans are the “best team in the world,” Sundhage said. Over and over she used that phrase. It’s not just their technical ability, she clarified. “If you have a game, you have to bring it,” Sundhage said. “When it really matters, the States have an ability to bring out the best performance.”

She would know. Before Monday’s opener, Sundhage’s side knew relatively little about their Nigerian opponents, who pushed them to a 3-3 tie. Against the Americans, they know almost too much. Several U.S. players, including defender Meghan Klingenberg and rising striker Christen Press, cut their teeth in the Swedish league.

The familiarity adds an edge, players agreed.

“It’s fun playing against your friends, it’s fun seeing your teammates again,” Klingenberg said. “But we wanna win.”

Above all else, Sundhage is the golden link that binds these two teams. Tonight, the Swedish skip will stare across the pitch at a U.S. team she coached for almost five years with stunning success, leading them to two Olympic golds, a 2011 World Cup final appearance and a staggering 101 wins in 107 games.

In 2012, Sundhage returned home to Sweden, where she launched her career as a teenager 40 years ago. For the star athletes of her former program, and now-U.S. head coach Jill Ellis, she has mountains of praise.

“The reason I’m sitting here is because of the U.S. team,” Sundhage said. “They made me look good.”

However, this is Pia Sundhage, fearless and fiercely astute speaker, so there’s always more to say — or that she’s already said. Early in Thursday’s press conference, a reporter raised his hand. He wanted to know what Sundhage thought about her recent profile in the New York Times, in which she made frank and striking statements about several U.S. players. “Was it your intention to get a reaction?” he asked. “Or were you just speaking your mind?”

Sundhage, unruffled, only smiled. “You’ll have to tell me what I’ve said.”

So he did. In the New York Times story, which was published Wednesday but drawn from an interview in April, Sundhage spilled many beans about her former charges. She called pivotal U.S. midfielder Carli Lloyd a “challenge,” who could be the best or worst player on the team; she had similar words for embattled star goalkeeper Hope Solo, “especially when it comes to trouble;” she said if the U.S. was still her squad, Abby Wambach — the top goal scorer in history — wouldn’t start.

This is how the media works sometimes, fashioning a subject’s past statements into hooks in hopes of reeling in something deeper. But Sundhage doesn’t squirm on questions. She’ll talk, if someone is there to listen.

“OK,” Sundhage said brightly, and then she was off and running.

As far as Lloyd being a “challenge,” Sundhage said, the Swedish team has players like that too, who are smart and creative and sometimes agitate to try something different than what they’ve been told to do. It’s not a diss, but a rewarding puzzle for a coach.

“Those players,” Sundhage said, “they create gold.”

Wambach as a substitute? That’s because the 35-year-old striker is “special,” Sundhage said, and she would want to “make sure Abby will last forever and ever,” kept in reserve to bring in deadly headers when they most matter.

On the topic of the U.S. keeper, Sundhage stands by those comments, too.

“When it comes to Hope Solo, she’s a piece of work,” Sundhage quipped, and left space for the laughs that followed. “And that’s good as well. Because things happen around her, something outside the field, but when it comes to two-times-45 minutes, she is the best goalkeeper in the world. So why wouldn’t you try to make her happy?”

This kind of easy candidness is rare in the world of sport. It can ruffle feathers, and most coaches guard their words so as not to spark a tempest.

But after four decades fighting to build the women’s game, Sundhage sees a longer arc. She remembers when media cared little about her sport. Now that she has a slice of the world’s attention, she’s on a mission to keep it locked.

“I want to tell people how fantastic the women’s game is,” she said. “If I just give you the same old answers, it will be boring. I really try my best to give women’s soccer what they actually deserve… because I’ve been around role models, not only for the women’s game, but I would say for soccer and women in general.

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“And sometimes, I heard a comment, ‘You talk too much,’ ” she continued. “Yeah, probably I do. But at the end of the day, what’s the worst thing that can happen? I’ll get another question from you when you think I talk too much… there’ll be another day tomorrow, and we have a game tomorrow anyway.”

Oh right, the game. Whatever happens, this much is certain: The crowd at Investors Group Field will be squarely behind the U.S. side, just like it was on Monday when at least 10,000 visitors came out to cheer for Team USA. On the pitch, it felt like 90 per cent of the sold-out crowd had their backs, the U.S. players said.

Still, as the Americans prepare for the battle, Klingenberg had one small request for their travelling faithful.

“If they could just keep it down just a little bit when I’m trying to tell (Megan) Rapinoe instructions, that would be great,” the defender said with a sly grin. “And then, you know, bring it back up.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.