The USWNT needs to start telling itself the World Cup truth

This is what it looks like when the world catches up.

And yes, this is what it looks like when Secretariat stumbles.

The U.S. Women’s National Team made it into the knockout stages of the World Cup by the skin of their teeth — or better put, by a few inches of woodwork — early Tuesday morning via a 0-0 draw against Portugal, but after three straight games in which they’ve played below par, you would be hard-pressed to still call them the favorites in this tournament.

There is no longer a margin for error with Sweden likely waiting in the Round of 16, and the U.S. looks like a team that very much needs one. They spent 90 minutes against Portugal playing an indecisive game, lacking confidence and looking out-of-sync against the kind of opponent that, in past tournaments, they would have overwhelmed by force of personality.

But not in this World Cup, and not this USWNT.

“It’s not like we played well, by any means,” coach Vlatko Andonovski told reporters in Auckland, New Zealand, and the alarming part was that it could have applied to all 270 minutes his team has played so far in New Zealand.

In a seven-game World Cup, that is not a small sample size you can scoff at — it is nearly half the tournament, and a veritable trend.

Everything you need to know about the 2023 Women’s World Cup including schedule, scores and news

Some of the reasons behind it are beyond anything this coach and this roster can control. For starters, the field — expanded to 32 teams for the first time this year — is better than ever, with a smaller gap between the big teams and everyone else. Colombia beat Germany; the Philippines beat New Zealand; Canada was eliminated in the group stage. Ironically, the USWNT helped make that bed with their international stardom, but now they have to lay in it.

On the other side, the U.S. has allowed its once world-class youth system to fall behind. The under-20 team has not advanced from a World Cup group stage since 2016. The under-17 team has done so just once since 2008, losing in the 2022 quarterfinal.

With the USWNT bringing 14 debutants and a roster in transition to this World Cup, that amounts to taking a step back while a lot of other programs have taken a step forward. That explains part of what we’ve seen play out.

But even so, this team has played well below its level.

In no world should a Portugal team playing in its first World Cup have looked so much more fluid in attack than the two-time defending champions. The passing network shows a Portugal team that kept a strong shape and got everyone involved, while the U.S. played without a midfield structure and could only channel the ball down the left side.

Rose Lavelle should have helped solve those issues but instead picked up a needless yellow card that will see her miss the Round of 16, and never quite left her impact on the game.

If this is going to turn around, the USWNT needs to start telling itself the truth. That starts with Andonovski, who has looked out of his depth in this tournament on everything from substitutions, which have been handled bizarrely, to the overall structure of this team, with the coach insisting on a 4-3-3 formation that has been taken apart.

Portugal’s Francisco Neto ran circles around Andonovski. So did Dutch coach Andries Jonker. It’s not going to get easier from here, as the rest of the field begins to realize how easily the U.S. can be exploited.

But it’s not just a coaching problem — it extends to the players, too. The team has repeatedly failed to finish chances and seem to be waiting for a switch to flip without creating a spark to do so. Their attitude, which came under friendly fire from Carli Lloyd on Fox’s postgame panel, is not where it needs to be — at least in public. They are not the darlings of the sport anymore, but a team struggling to come to grips with its own underperformance.

There is no magic waiting to happen here. The U.S. is not going to start dominating teams a la 2019 just because. It needs to take a long look inward, adjust on the fly and figure out something that works. That is what makes Megan Rapinoe’s use of the passive voice after Tuesday’s match so concerning.

“I just have blind confidence in everything around us and in myself and in the group,” Rapinoe told reporters, staying on a bizarrely positive message echoed by Alex Morgan and others. “And it has to [get better]. It just has to.”

Thing is, it doesn’t.