With the United States women’s national team only three months away from the 2021 Summer Olympics, the window for earning one of the final spots on the team’s roster is getting smaller by the day. On Saturday, bubble defender Tierna Davidson got a big opportunity to make her case, starting and playing 90 minutes in a 1-1 draw with Sweden in Stockholm.
Davidson’s time with the U.S. has been equal parts surprising and consistent. Her first cap in early 2018 seemed to come out of nowhere, when she was only 19 years old and still in college at Stanford University. At the same time, from the moment of her first cap — matched up against Pernille Harder and Nadia Nadim — she has always maintained a calmness that belied her age and relative inexperience at the international level.
Heading into this summer, the starting defense for the United States seems fairly well set with Becky Sauerbrunn and Abby Dahlkemper — who missed Saturday’s game with an injury — playing in the center and Crystal Dunn and Kelley O’Hara running the flanks. The questions for head coach Vlatko Andonovski are around how many backup defenders is he planning on bringing to Tokyo and who gets those coveted spots on the roster.
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