The 2019 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Friday, June 7 in France. The United States team is the defending champions but their path to repeating is a perilous one. The field is stronger than it ever has been before and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see any of the top ten teams lifting the trophy on July 7.
To help prepare you to root for team and country, we’re going to run a short profile of every player on the 23-person roster. When female athletes take their turn in the spotlight, they often receive coverage that is slanted toward non-game aspects of their stories — marriage, children, sexual preference, perceived lack-of or bountiful sexiness, social media activity, etc. In the hope of balancing things out, just a tiny bit, these previews will strive to stay on the field, with only a little bit of non-gendered personal interest when possible.
Alex Morgan
Position: Forward
Club: Orlando Pride
Number: 13
National team experience: 163 appearances, this will be her third World Cup, she has 101 goals. During the 2019 She Believes Cup, Morgan played almost every minute of every game.
What I wrote in 2015: Morgan is one of the big mysteries of the World Cup… it seemed as though the torch of great American strikers that started with Mia Hamm and was passed to Abby Wambach would be passed neatly to Alex Morgan. Morgan had everything you’d want from a striker. She’s fast, skilled, and opportunistic. Her goal scoring touch was only matched by her ability to put herself in the right place at the right time. Alas, things have not gone so smoothly since then. She’s been beset by a series of injuries, many to a troublesome left ankle, that have left her frequently unavailable to play and less effective when she does play. When healthy, she’s one of the best strikers in the world.
What to expect from Alex Morgan in 2019: Not much has changed in terms of what to expect from Alex Morgan. She is still the mainstay at the front of the United States attack. Four years older, perhaps, but not a step slower and, knock on wood, not hampered by injuries the way she was earlier in her career. There’s a little bit of Sidney Crosby to Alex Morgan’s game. She’s not the most powerful or the fastest or the most technically gifted player in the world, but she’s still one of the best. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate her game for its relentless scrappy nature. In a game the United States is controlling, your eye tends to gravitate toward other players, but in a close game, it’s Alex Morgan who is going to be making the same threatening runs at minute 88 at the same speed she was making them at minute five. Eventually she finds a way through. When you watch her highlight package below, notice how many of her goals look like she scored kinda just because one of her teammates made a good pass and she plunked the ball into the net. Now know that she scores more goals than anyone else and it becomes clear that the goals look that simple because she’s in the right place at the right time more often than anyone else. That’s an elite skill in and of itself!
Video:
Non-gendered personal interest item: Morgan is the author of a series of children’s books about, you guessed it, soccer! The first book in the series is Saving the Team. The book’s main character is a 12 year-old who becomes the captain and leader of a dysfunctional soccer team…
Links: Here are her Wikipedia page, U.S. Soccer page, and Twitter.