The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. 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.
Carli Lloyd
Position:Midfielder
Number: 10
National team experience: 194appearances, this will be her third World Cup, and she has 63 international goals.
What to expect from Carli Lloyd: Carli Lloyd is one of the most powerful soccer players in the world. From her position in the center of the midfield, (although coach Jill Ellis has experimented with her in an outside midfield role), Lloyd works tirelessly on offense and defense. She is noticeably stronger than almost everyone else in the sport. This shows itself in different ways on offense and defense. On offense, you’ll notice that once Lloyd has the ball, it’s almost impossible to get it away from her. On defense, watch her make legal (most of the time) contact with an opponent and notice how they fly away from her, leaving her and the U.S. team with vitally important possession of the ball. Lloyd’s other noticeable super power is her shot, which she unleashes from long distance, often 20-25 yards from the goal. From most players, this type of shot would sarcastically be labeled, “ambitious.” From Lloyd, it’s totally realistic. She can’t score at will from distance, but it’s pretty close. Lloyd doesn’t have the vision, dribbling, or passing abilities of some of her midfield counterparts, but she more than makes up for it with power and determination. Lloyd should play close to every minute of the World Cup this year.
Video: Lloyd scores a lot but to really appreciate her game, you need to see her play away from the ball as well.
Non-gendered personal interest item: Lloyd was Rutgers University’s first four-time All American athlete. Not that my alma mater has a particularly fine athletic tradition, but Paul Robeson did play football and sing there, so back off!
Today, Dear Sports Fan is a close to full-time job for me. I publish between two and four posts every day, although I do take weekends. Over four years, the blog has been viewed over 120,000 times and it keeps growing. Last week was my biggest week yet, with over 3,200 views. The traffic is still 90% from search engines although I have a wonderful group of people who interact with me on Facebook, Twitter, and the sports-only social network, Fancred. So both non-sports fans and fans alike enjoy reading our posts. I am thrilled by this discover and am continuing to try to figure out where Dear Sports Fan’s sweet spot is in this diverse audience. One thing is for sure. My passion for sports and desire to make the sports world a friendly, understandable world for everyone who ventures into it remain strong. In just the past couple weeks, here are a few ways in which sports has intersected in my life that have reminded me that the goals of Dear Sports Fan are relevant and worthwhile.
As a new resident of Boston, I’ve been looking to make new friends and business connections. So, I’ve been going to some Meetup groups. One of them was an entrepreneurs group that met at a candlepin bowling alley. Within five minutes of getting there, I was helping people understand how the scoring worked. After a pleasant evening of networking and bowling, I went home and wrote about how candlepin bowling works. Playing sports can create and cement friendships.
This week, I am spending some time with a sick relative. She napped most of the day yesterday, and was generally a little bummed out and distracted until late afternoon when her head snapped back and her eyes lit up, “What time is the hockey game tonight?” Following sports can be a passion throughout life.
Of course, it’s not always smooth. Living with a sports fan, as my girlfriend does (although, to be fair, she is also a sports fan, just one who spends less time watching sports on TV) can be a challenge. And even someone who thinks and writes about how to best cohabitate in a mixed-sports-passion relationship, doesn’t always get it right. Sports can bring people together but it takes thought and care, just like other parts of a romantic, familial, or work-related relationship.
Four years may seem like a long time but I hope it’s just the start of the journey. There’s so much more to explore and explain. In the next few weeks, I’ll be working on hard on the upcoming Women’s Soccer World Cup. The World Cup is an ideal event for Dear Sports Fan. It’s an international event with competition at the very highest level. The U.S. team is a wonderful group of athletes on a mission to recapture the first World Cup Championship since 1999. To date, I’m about half-way through profiling each of the women on the U.S. team (I’m attempting the rare feat of profiling female athletes only as athletes, with no reference to gender or gendered stories). So far, these profiles have been a hit. One athlete, Shannon Boxx, even retweeted my profile of her! This was awesome, because it helped me connect with a group of passionate women’s soccer fans. You can find all of the profiles here. I’m also compiling the material I’ve written over the past four years and creating a series of soccer email courses: Soccer 101, 200 level courses on soccer culture, crime and punishment, events and leagues, and positions, and a 300 level course. Keep an eye out for those in the next couple weeks.
So, happy birthday to me, and thank you for reading, doing social networky things, and above all, asking questions!
Imagine you’re a striker. Your sole purpose in soccer and perhaps in life is to score goals. You are single-mindedly devoted to goal-scoring in the lowest scoring popular sport in the world. When you score, you are the hero of all heroes. If you don’t, you are the greatest failure in the history of the world… for that week, at least. Strikers should be fast, fast enough to run by defenders. They need to be strong, strong enough to fend of defenders who are often bigger than them. Forwards also need excellent ball skills, deceptive enough to fake defenders out and sure enough to hold onto the ball despite being surrounded by three, four, or five opposing players. It’s no surprise that strikers are typically the most temperamental players on the soccer field. Since they’re most often in a position to earn their team a penalty kick by being fouled, they’re usually the most frequent divers or “foul simulators” in the game. Strikers are dependent on their teammates to pass them the ball, a job which is actually called “providing service.” Like Wide Receivers in American Football, this doesn’t encourage them to be nice, humble, cuddly people, but instead it encourages flamboyant, self-aggrandizing, lunatics. Above everything else, the best strikers in the world have amazing instincts. They seem to know where a ball is going to bounce and how to kick it through and around the sea of legs to score a goal. They have a seemingly supernatural ability to accelerate and sprint by a defender just when he’s least expecting it.
Soccer people sometimes use numbers to refer to positions. Strikers may be referred to as number nines if they play in the center of the field and 11s if they play on one side or the other.
Center Forward
The center forward is the prototypical attacking player, so they are usually referred to simply as strikers. Strikers have a lot of flexibility about where they play, so you may see one on either side of the field, but their natural hunting ground is the center of the field. A great striker should be the fastest sprinter on the field. During most of the game, a striker will meander around the back line of the opposing team, probing for weaknesses. At opportune moments, she will sprint between defenders, trying to time things just right, so that she is a step ahead of the defender when she receives the pass but not offsides. Once the striker has the ball and sees a clear path to the goal, his instincts take over and every nerve and muscle in his body is devoted to scoring. Rifle a shot past the goalie or dribble around him and what awaits is the glorious feeling of seeing the ball hit the back of the net. Strikers should also be proficient at heading the ball into the net.
Target forward
Scoring in virtually impossible in soccer. Just moving the ball up the field while maintaining possession is difficult. Teams that deploy a target forward try to establish an attacking position by sending her up the field and then attempting long passes. A target forward will establish a position, turn her back to the goal she’s trying to score on, and then make herself available to receive a pass. The target forward uses his (usually big and strong) body to shield the ball from people on the other field, protecting it for long enough for his teammates to run up the field and join him. In this role, a target forward’s job is still to create goals, but she’s not necessarily the one who will score the majority of them. A good target forward is adept at flicking nifty passes to their teammates who are running towards goal.
Winger
In formations with two or more strikers, there’s often one player who plays less centrally than the other. This player is referred to as a winger because he or she spends more time closer to the side or the wing of the field than the center. Wingers are usually smaller and faster than their central attacking counterparts. They are less frequently used as the target for a long pass up the field or a cross swinging into the center, so their ability to out-jump and out-muscle defenders is not as important. Instead, wingers are crafty, quick, and manipulative. They are the masters of the dark arts of attacking soccer: how to time a run just right to beat an offsides trap, how to win a set piece by playing the ball off a defender’s leg and out of bounds, or by how to trick a referee into calling a foul.
The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. 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.
Sydney Leroux
Position:Striker
Number: 2
National team experience: 70appearances, this will be her first World Cup, and she has 35 international goals.
What to expect from Sydney Leroux: At this point, even with only one friendly game left before the World Cup begins, no one is really sure who will be starting in the two forward attacking positions for the U.S. team. This is certainly a problem of excess — the team has so many good options, it’s hard to choose one. Sydney Leroux is one of those options. Whether she starts or comes off the bench, Leroux plays the same way: she looks to use her speed and physicality to run onto balls played to her through, around, or over the defense. Once she has the ball, it’s tough to knock her off of it. She often eschews early shots, seeming to prefer to dribble around defenders and even the goalie before tapping the ball into an open net. When she’s off her game, she doesn’t look as though she’s contributing, because she’s not a player who gets in position for easy passes and then plays the ball off to another attacker. When it’s not working for her on the field, she just basically can’t get the ball. When it is working though, she’s perhaps the team’s most high-octane, aggressive attacking threat. No matter what, her work rate is extremely high — she’s always running and she works tirelessly to harass defenders when the other team has the ball.
Video: This is a classic Leroux goal. She gets behind the defense with a well-timed, fast run, receives a pass, and then dribbles around the goalie to score.
Non-gendered personal interest item: Leroux is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States. She was born and raised in Canada and played for Canadian youth national teams but decided to play at the senior level for the United States. This decision has made her women’s soccer public enemy number one in Canada. Expect her to be booed by Canadian fans every time she touches the ball throughout the tournament but especially if the U.S. and Canada meet up in an elimination round game.
Everyone has a sports story. As part of my mission to create peace in the world between sports fans and non-sports fans, I am doing a set of interviews of people on both sides of the line. Whether you’re a die-hard fan with their favorite player’s face tattooed onto their body or someone who is not a fan but whose life intersects with sports in some way, you have a valuable story to tell. Sign up today to tell your story on our easy to use booking page or email me at dearsportsfan@gmail.com.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to Craig Caruso. A VoIP employee during the day and a mobile app designer by night, Craig finds time between to follow his home town teams — or at least three of them. Staten Island born and bread, Caruso has his choice of the New York teams and some choice words about the rest. In his photo, Craig is wearing a the bacon logo of the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs on his hat and a shirt that supports New York Yankees third baseman, Alex Rodriguez. You can read a synopsis of our interview below or listen to it in full here.
Name: Craig Caruso
Teams:
New York Yankees
New York Jets
New York Rangers
Born and lives in: Staten Island, NY
Do you have any sports superstitions?
No, not really. I try to wear my jersey when I can, just to be in the spirit with the team.
What is your earliest sports memory?
It’s funny, I’m a Yankees fan but my first game that I ever went to as a kid was a Mets game. It was at Shea. My Dad’s union took everyone at the shop out for a day out at Shea — there was probably a hundred of us — and my dad was like, “Okay, let’s go to your first baseball game.”
Were you a Mets fan at the time?
I really didn’t have a team alliance, I would say, I just went because… at the time I didn’t know better. And then I got into sports and I started growing into certain teams, and liking certain players. I have a superstition — my favorite number is 23 — and then I started watching baseball and I started liking the Yankees and I started liking Don Mattingly and all of a sudden… I started watching baseball a lot.
What did you like about Mattingly?
Just how he led the team. He wasn’t really the captain but… how he led the team, how he played first base, how he commanded himself on the field, the things he did for the Yankees. It’s kind of funny, he never made a World Series championship but they made it the year after he left and the year before he came to the Yankees — they were World Series championship teams.
What do you think sports adds to your life?
Excitement. When you have something in common with a lot of people, you can go to work, you can talk sports with someone, even if you’re not a Jets or a Rangers or a Yankees fan, there’s always that commonality with people about what teams they like. I work in NJ and there’s a lot of Philly fans — it’s that commonality you have: Did you see the game last night? Did you see the hit? Did you see the pass? Who are the Phillies playing tonight? It’s the commonality that really brings people together.
If it wasn’t sports, what would our common language be?
Probably technology. I think we would be talking more about coding, design, UI, and UX. You know, all the other crazy things we do at work. And I think that would probably connect us more than sports — love of technology.
Do you think you miss out on anything in life because of sports?
No. Am I sitting in front of a game every night? No. I think with the day and age that we live in, we’re always somewhat connected to our phones or Apple watches. Life is more important than one game. Baseball is 162 games, I don’t have to watch every single one. I think some people over-obsess about sports. You know, “I gotta watch the Yanks, I gotta watch the game.” No, you have to prioritize your life on what really comes first. If it’s Game Seven, Stanley Cup, and the Rangers are in it, that takes a little priority but you don’t have to watch every Yankees game.
On going to Jets games with his father:
He’s a football fan, not necessarily a Jets fan or a Giants fan. He’s a football fan. If he could get the NFL package wherever he was, he would watch every game, every Sunday. But he goes with me because he knows I enjoy it, we enjoy it together, and seeing football live is more fun than watching it on TV.
What is the best part of seeing football live?
The atmosphere, the environment. People laugh — Jets fan, Jets fan — but there’s nothing more exhilarating than seeing that Jets chant live with Fireman Ed, and getting the crowd really rowdy, and not rowdy, but in your face. And the opposing players know you’re in Met Life stadium. You know you’re in the home of the Jets. I’m a Yankees fan and I go to maybe 10-15 games a year. It’s not like that. It’s two different sports but — I’m a Bleacher Creature, I do roll call, I sit with the Yankee fans in the outfield — but there’s nothing more exhilerrating than being at a Jets game and hearing chants going for four quarters.
On basketball:
I dropped basketball completely many years ago, I don’t even watch it anymore.
Why did you stop watching basketball?
Jordan left.
What was it about Jordan?
Everything. The shots he’s taken — just seeing a player like that, working with the Bulls, passing to Pippen. He used his weapons and he could always count on his weapons. If it’s a pass to Pippen, he knows Pippen is going to get it in. If it’s Rodman defending… Luc Longly. All those players. And they know if they have the ball, they know they can pass it back to Jordan to make the shot. Just seeing him running up and down the court, back and forth. And hustling, not giving up. There’s no player that hustles like Jordan or hustled like Jordan.
What would you like non-sports fans to understand about sports or sports fans?
We have a passion for a lot of things. Come to a game with us. We have a passion for our teams and there are times you have to — if you’re a non-sports fan — you just have to get into it a little bit to cheer your team on, even if it’s the Rangers or the Jets or the Yankees or even the Mets who are doing excellent this year. Just embrace it, and try it, if you don’t like it, great, sure, no harm no foul, but give it a chance. Embrace your team, embrace your city. You don’t have to fall in love with the Yankees. Embrace the city and, especially in NY — NY goes crazy when our teams start winning. Embrace it — be happy for everyone else.
What is your favorite stadium food?
I actually have to admit — I do go to some Mets games and I think the Mets have the best collection of foods — and [the best is] probably Shake Shack. It’s funny — I’m a die hard Yankees fan and I always will be, but I’m rooting for the Mets this year. Listen, Yankees stadium will always be Yankees stadium but I think Yankee stadium was built as more of a memorial and a museum to the older players. You go to Citi field and it’s like an amusement park. If you want Chinese, sushi, pizza, you have your options. I feel like Yankee Stadium does not have enough food options or variety. Even across from Shake Shack, there’s a Mexican place that’s amazing.
If you could be any type of professional athlete, what would it be?
I think my favorite would probably be a defensive end or a center, like a Nick Mangold center. You have the upper body strength, yeah you have the weight to you, but you have the upper body strength and the lower body strength to run through a brick wall.
The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. 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.
Ali Krieger
Position:Defender
Number: 11
National team experience: 65appearances, this will be her second World Cup, and she has 1 international goal.
What to expect from Ali Krieger: At 30 years old and going into her second World Cup, Ali Krieger should be a constant veteran presence on the back line for the United States. Four years ago, she played every minute of the World Cup in Germany and scored the final goal in the team’s shoot-out victory over Brazil to advance to the semifinals. The only fly in the ointment for Krieger has been injuries. She has had bad luck when it comes to the timing and severity of injuries throughout her career. In college, she broke her leg days before the NCAA tournament her Junior year. In 2012 she tore her ACL and MCL and was forced to miss the Olympics. Fans of her feared a repeat when she suffered a concussion in a NWSL game a month ago. She returned to play May 17 in the U.S. women’s national team’s second to last friendly before the World Cup. If all goes well, Krieger will play every minute of this World Cup, holding down the right side of the U.S. defense with confident, consistent play. She’s not quite as offense minded as her counterpart over on the left side of the field, Meghan Klingenberg, but that’s okay, the team has plenty of offensive weapons.
Video: It’s really a shame that people don’t create highlight videos from solid defensive plays. This is Ali Krieger’s one goal and also the one highlight (other than getting injured) I can find for her on YouTube.
Non-gendered personal interest item: One sure sign of gender equality in sports is when injuries suffered by female athletes are as written, talked, and obsessed about as men’s. Krieger’s latest concussion is evidence that we’re approaching that. Howard Megdal used it as an example of the difficult decisions athletes and teams are forced to make about head injuries in the New York Times, and Fox Sports‘ Laura Vecsey covered her decision to wear a custom-build protective headband.
The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. 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.
Meghan Klingenberg
Position:Defender
Number: 25
National team experience: 32appearances, this will be her first World Cup, and she has 2 international goals.
What to expect from Meghan Klingenberg: Undersized world class athletes, like 5’2″ Meghan Klingenberg, survive in every sport by having one or two remarkable qualities. For pint-sized NHL star, Martin St. Louis, it’s his freaky lower-body strength. For NBA legend, Allen Iverson, it was a mixture of quickness and complete disregard for his own safety. For Meghan Klingenberg, it’s speed. When you watch her play, she’s consistently a step or four ahead of her opponents. At times, her teammates will pass the ball in Klingenber’s direction but so far away that you think, “oh that’s a bad pass…” and then you watch Klingenberg catch up to the ball. Her speed and her experience in college as a midfielder make her perfect for playing the outside defense position as coach Jill Ellis likes to utilize it. In Ellis’ system, the wing defender is expected to move all the way up the field, helping the team transition to offense by playing give-and-go with central players before launching a cross into the penalty box. Klingenberg will be doing that for most of the World Cup — she’s played in all eight games the team has played in 2015 and started seven of them.
Video: My favorite part of this video is how, even after a goal as magnificent as this one, Klingenberg’s speed is what sticks in her teammates minds.
The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. 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.
Julie Johnston
Position:Defender
Number: 26
National team experience: 10appearances, this will be her first World Cup, and she has 3 international goals.
What to expect from Julie Johnston: Going into a World Cup with an inexperienced central defender is something that would usually strike fear into even the most optimistic soccer fans. Julie Johnston is the exception to that rule. Despite being 23 and having only played ten games with the senior national team, Johnston has played so confidently and well this spring, that her presence on the field has the opposite affect. She’s a calming and confidence inspiring presence for teammates and fans. The United States often dominates games and so Johnston’s main job from her central defensive position is to organize, play passes up to the midfielders, and stay vigilant against any budding counter-attacks. When the team faces tougher competition, as it will during the World Cup, it will be interesting to see if Johnston will be able to remain as physically dominant and mentally prepared as she has so far in her career. If she does, there’s no reason to think she won’t play every minute of the World Cup for team USA. Talking about careers, three goals for a central defender is a reasonable career total for some who play the position, but Johnston has already reached that number in only ten games. Watch for her leaping, aerial runs to the near post on corner kicks and free kicks. That’s where she’s done all her scoring so far.
Video: One of three goals that Johnston has scored for the national team, all off Lauren Holidayset pieces.
Non-gendered personal interest item: Johnston led the U.S. Under-20 year-old national team to a championship in the 2012 U-20 World Cup. During that tournament, she played central defender, the same role she’ll play this year at the senior level, and captained the team. If Johnston helps the team capture what’s been an incredibly elusive World Cup victory, would anyone be surprised if four or eight years from now, Johnston was captain of the senior team and a fixture at the back?
Why do some numbers in soccer refer to positions? What do they mean?
Thanks,
Susan
Dear Susan,
Numbers are often used in soccer to refer to a player’s position. The use of a number system to refer to positions is not unusual in sports. In American football, the NFL regulates jersey numbers so that each position has a set of numbers only its players are eligible to wear. It’s typical in basketball to refer to a player’s position by number but at least there, there are only five positions to keep track of and a player’s jersey number virtually never matches his position as it sometimes does in soccer. The use of numbers in soccer is legitimately confusing for a few reasons. First, there are 11 players on the field for each team and remembering 11 positions by number is difficult. Second, there was once an assumption that a player would wear the number of the position he played but that’s no longer the case. Third, the meaning of the numbers has evolved over time in twisted ways so that they can no longer be said to be intuitive. Luckily, only a few positions are commonly referred to by number and they are quite easy to learn. We’ll run through the history first and then get to the modern meanings.
Having players wear numbers on the back of their jerseys is actually a relatively modern phenomenon. It began in the 1920s in England with the club team Chelsea. Instead of giving their players a choice, the team assigned numbers by position. Of the 11 players on the field, they started with the most defensive player, the goalie, and counted upwards from one to 11, going from right to left when players were on the same line. Unfortunately for modern soccer viewers, the teams of the 1920s played a very different formation from ones that are common today. Chelsea played with two defenders, three midfielders, and a whopping five forwards. Today, teams play in more defensive formations with four defenders and either three midfielders and three forwards or four midfielders and two forwards. As you might imagine, this has magnificently jumbled the numbering. The shift in formation is only one of the evolutionary forces that make soccer numbers difficult to follow. Soon after they began using numbers, Chelsea took a trip to South America, where according to Wikipedia, they were called “Los Numerados” or “the numbered.” The South American host teams picked up the concept of numbering their players from back to front but, since they played with different formations, they used almost entirely different number to position pairings.
For a while, this must have been so confusing to international viewers as to make the numbers virtually useless in decoding the game. Over time though, as formations have continued to evolve and soccer has become an even more globally blended game, with players from all over playing everywhere, the differing number systems have coalesced into something of a consensus. Simultaneously, players became more empowered in terms of choosing their jersey number. Although they were in the past, today’s players are no longer required to wear the number of their position. What we’re left with is the use of some numbers to refer to positions despite the fact that their meanings are almost totally divorced from jersey numbers. Here are a few of the most important numbers to know:
9 — A nine is the central attacker on any team. Whether she uses speed to streak towards the goal and score or strength to receive long passes and hold on to the ball while his teammates move up the field, the nine is the focal point of the offense.
10 — The ten is the best playmaker on the team. The offense flows through her on its way up the field. He is often the best known player, the most well respected player, the highest paid player, and the team captain as well.
6 — A six is a holding or defensive midfielder. Like a nine, a player can be a six in different ways. A six may be a big, strong, tough player who acts as an additional defender, following the opposition’s best midfield player and tackling them hard. A six may also be a playmaker, like a ten, but farther back, helping the team transition from defense to offense.
Those are by far the most common positions you’ll hear called out by number. Here are a few others you could learn if you really want to impress people:
8 — An eight is an all-purpose central midfielder. Without the offensive playmaking talents of a ten or the defensive mindset of a six, the eight does a little bit of everything. An eight is often one of the hardest working players on the field, since they have equal responsibility for offense and defense.
7 and 11 — The seven or eleven are secondary scorers. If a team plays with three attackers, the seven refers to the forward on the right, the nine to the central forward, and the 11 to the attacker on the left. On teams that play with only two attackers, either the seven or the 11 may be an outside midfielder with an attacking mindset.
3 — Time to give the defenders some. Defense is by far the most confusingly numbered area (remember the original Chelsea team only played with two of them) but the three is always used to refer to the strongest central defender. A great central defender is big, tough, and indefatigable.
Now that you know the meanings given to these numbers, go out and use them in a soccer context. You’ll get some knowing looks from the soccer fans in your life. And if anyone tries to drop a number we haven’t covered, like four or five, just ask them, “Do you mean a South American four or an European one?” That’ll stop them in their tracks!
The 2015 soccer Women’s World Cup begins on Saturday, June 6 in Canada. The United States team is one of a handful of favorites to win the tournament and they’ve got a great story. Despite decades of excellent play, the team has not won a World Cup championship since 1999. That’s a whole generation of dreams denied and all the reason anyone should need to root for the team this year. 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.
Lauren Holiday
Position:Midfielder
Number: 12
National team experience: 122appearances, this will be her second World Cup, and she has 23 international goals.
What to expect from Lauren Holiday: For the U.S. team to win the World Cup, Lauren Holiday must be one of their best players. Holiday plays as a holding midfielder. This is the person who plays in the center of the field, closest to the four defenders. Some players in this role are honorary fifth defenders — tough, physical players who anchor the midfield to the back line. Holiday takes a different approach. From the same position, she’s the team’s most common and potent playmaker. She’ll drop back to the defense, collect the ball, survey the field, and then play exactly the right pass to the right person to start a dangerous attach. She’s one of a handful of players on the team who look almost indescribably different from everyone else on the field. Holiday never looks rushed or out of control. She has extraordinary vision and technical ability. When she decides to score, she’ll often launch shots from distance and she’s got the chops to place the ball just where the goalie can’t reach it. Watch for her starting the attack in the course of play and also on corner kicks and set pieces.
Video: Okay, there’s something a tiny bit creepy about a fan cutting up game film to create a video of just one player’s every moves but particularly for a playmaker like Holiday, it’s actually a great way to see what she’s all about.
Non-gendered personal interest item: As she talks about in a video on her US Soccer player page, Holiday had open heart surgery when she was three years old. She’s also married (I know, we’re creeping up to the gender line) to NBA point guard Jrue Holiday. This is relevant because aside from perhaps a quarterback in football, a basketball point guard is the closest sports analog to the way Holiday plays soccer. It’s fun to think about a relationship between two people who have such similar instincts and skills in the sports they excel at.
