Well, that happened. It took a mishit Alana Cook cross and a major goalkeeping error for the United States women’s national team to defeat Ireland, 1-0 on Tuesday in St. Louis, Missouri.
In the end, that was one of only two shots on target from the U.S. — the same number as Ireland had. The United States’ final match before head coach Vlatko Andonovski names his 2023 World Cup roster was hardly impressive from a team perspective, but that wasn’t the focus, Andonovski said postgame. Instead, he said Tuesday was about individual players getting time to reintegrate into the team and shake off some rust.
The most prominent of those players was 18-year-old Alyssa Thompson, who raced to the airport on Friday night in Los Angeles as a replacement call-up for the injured Mallory Swanson. Thompson played the entire match in her first start on Tuesday.
These are three major talking points from the match.
