CHESTER, Pa. — U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes slapped the table repeatedly at Subaru Park on Thursday as she described how she felt watching her team lose to Portugal 2-1 moments earlier.
“I was frustrated this evening because I felt like a game of a Whac-A-Mole,” Hayes said, hitting different parts of the table to illustrate the point. “I felt like if I put something out then I was whacking that. That’s how the game felt for me as a coach, and I’ve been doing this for so long — I hate them games.”
Portugal scored both goals on corner kicks — “no coach likes conceding on f—ing set pieces ever,” Hayes eventually said with a smile as she walked away from the news conference, drawing a laugh from the room — and the U.S. struggled to connect with and without the ball against a well-organized Portuguese team.
“It felt really individual out there,” said midfielder Rose Lavelle, who scored 35 seconds into the match. “I think everyone was trying to fix it on their own.” Captain Lindsey Heaps added that “sometimes it felt a little bit like we were on islands.”
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The tepid performance evoked at least passing memories of the 2023 World Cup, where the USWNT held on for a draw with Portugal by mere inches — with the help of the goalpost in stoppage time — and avoided their first group-stage exit in World Cup history. Alarm bells were literally ringing around Eden Park that day in Auckland, New Zealand due to a malfunctioning sprinkler — a scene that portended the team’s worst World Cup finish a few days later at the hands of Sweden.
But Hayes wasn’t the coach then, and though she was palpably disappointed with Thursday’s “rushed” performance from her team, she isn’t alarmed.
“As Ben Northey, the [Australian] conductor would say, ‘Let it go,'” Hayes said motioning her hand back past her face.
It sounds like an easy out for Hayes, but Thursday’s loss comes 113 days after the U.S. last played — “it looked like a team in preseason to me,” Hayes said. More importantly, it was 609 days ahead of the 2027 World Cup.
The loss on Thursday is the team’s third of the calendar year, which has happened only four other times in the program’s 40-year history. Never has the U.S. team lost four matches in a calendar year.
Portugal’s diamond shape in the midfield allowed it to keep 60% possession in the first half and find the open spaces between the three-player midfield of the U.S. Portugal played around the Americans frequently, although Portugal was generally wasteful in front of goal during open play.
The problems for the U.S. compounded across every line. Hayes lamented mistimed defensive challenges and lost duels. And then there were the set pieces, of course. Diana Gomes outjumped three defenders on the six-yard line to score Portugal’s equalizer just before halftime, and Fátima Pinto added the second after the Americans failed to clear a corner kick..
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“I think there was stuff that didn’t work out all over the field,” midfielder Sam Coffey said.
“There’s a million excuses you could make — and we’re not going to. To say that we haven’t been together or we’re young or whatever is a cop-out. The standard of this team is to own when you are not good enough and you’re not playing up to the standard of the crest. There is a standard of winning, and it exceeds all of those things.”
Thursday’s loss is only the third in program history for the USWNT against an opponent outside of the top 20 in FIFA’s rankings. It is a hard lesson for a young American team that Hayes warned not to underestimate Portugal.
The biggest concern wasn’t the result — it was the flat, disjointed performance, and the individual ways in which players tried to solve those problems in real time. The lack of problem-solving and creativity ultimately were the team’s undoing. That description feels like the 2023 World Cup meeting between the U.S. and Portugal.
“Don’t bring me back to that game,” Heaps said with a slight laugh Thursday.
But the good news for the USWNT — at least for now — is that the poor showing is an anomaly in the Hayes era. Hayes took over as coach a few months before the 2024 Olympics and led the team to a gold medal, then proceeded to overhaul the program and win while experimenting to unprecedented levels as she handed out 24 first caps in her first 24 games.
The Hayes era has been off to a flying start in the first 18 months, which is partly why a relatively cheerful Heaps said repeatedly Thursday after the match that her team can’t be too negative. Thursday wasn’t a World Cup, but rather the first game for this core group on the journey to qualifying next year.
Yes, it was ugly. It was disjointed. But it wasn’t entirely discouraging or alarming.
“It’s a game of football, no one died,” Hayes said. “We’ve got to be better, and I promise you we will be better — we better be.”
A rematch Sunday against Portugal in East Hartford, Connecticut, might at least partly explain that optimism. Goalkeeper Phallon Tullis-Joyce said simply about what is on her mind for Sunday: “Revenge, for sure.”
