Wambach breaks leg, will miss Olympics

Maybe, maybe not, shotty. As long as she didn't move her leg too much, it could have been more numb than painful -- I know that's what I felt when I broke a bone in my hand once. Kind of surprised me how little pain there was, you know, until I tried to close my fist. THEN it hurt like hell.

So believe it or not, she might not have been in too much acute pain laying on the ground. Not to mention her personality is such that her expression wasn't terribly surprising ...

 

You could very well be right, buck. Only break I ever had was my ankle in a basketball game, and the reaction came so quickly after the action that I just knew instant pain.

 

The play wasn't dirty, just a big collision. But I agree, the Brazilians were very rough on her. Nonstop slide tackles, contact, all that jazz. It was blatantly obvious they were trying to rough her up.

 

I don't think so.
I think it was a case of Wambach being one tough lady.

 

I don't know beans about women's soccer or men's soccer for that matter but why is one of the US's top players playing in an exhibition, the last one before the Olympics?
Do NFL teams play their starters much in the final preseason game?
An NFL coach would be fired if he left his starting QB play more than the first series or two of the final preseason game.

 

Not uncommon in an Olympic warm-up. It's considered part of their training schedule.

 

On the other hand, if you let senior teams in the Olympics, it would be tailor-made for England haters.

 

England doesn't send a team, or even try to qualify, since the Olympic team is Great Britain, and none of the individual British soccer associations want to join together to put a team out.

They may make an exception for 2012, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

As far as the Olympics vs. the World Cup, making the Olympics U23 has nothing to do with FIFA wanting to hold back players for the World Cup, it has more to do with FIFA encouraging countries to emphasize the Olympics.

The Olympics have no stature in most of the soccer world compared to the World Cup, which is much, much bigger.

In the Communist, pre-U23 days, the soccer powers of the world in South America and western Europe would send teams that were the equivalent of Serie B squads.

Neither country nor clubs wanted to risk getting their stud players hurt in what's considered a secondary tournament. The Communist and developing countries approached it differently and sent full squads and that's evident in the medal totals after WWII as the Eastern bloc won all but two of the golds ... Sweden '48 and France '84 excepted.

FIFA made it a 23U tournament to give Olympic soccer relevance in 1992. For the most part, it has worked.

There's no desire on the part of the soccer powers to create the equivalent to the Dream Team, that's what the World Cup is for.

 

I think if you add in the logistics of the Olympics, especially since the European Championships are always played in the same summer, it would be nigh-on impossible to play two top-level tournaments in one summer thanks to the length of the domestic European season.

The countries that are going from Europe, like Italy and the Netherlands, have enough depth that if they miss their good young players and a few old hands their domestic leagues won't be affected.

If you start pulling the entire Italian squad out of Serie A, which is about to start preseason training for a August 30 kickoff, you're basically making those players go 22 months straight, all the way from the start of the 2007 season to the end of the 2009 season.