The San Francisco Bay Area will field a WPS team playing when the league commences in 2009. They
may be latecomers, San Francisco is home to WPS headquarters, and it seems only fitting that there
will be a team based there.
The Doncaster Belles, one of the best known and best established women's football clubs, announced
this week that the club is on the verge of bankruptcy, and will shut their doors
Chicago's WPS team unveiled their name - Red Stars - and new logo at a ceremony yesterday. The
unveiling took place at Toyota Park, the Red Stars' future home ground.
Just wanted to say that I was at the San Jose Earthquakes-LA Galaxy game last night, and the
civilian penalty competition at half-time was won by a woman, and the only one of the finalists to
shoot on target, with a sweet, well-placed shot from the halfway line.
US defender Cat Whitehill will miss the Beijing Olympics after suffering an ACL injury during a
training session in Seoul, Korea, where the US Women's Team is currently competing in the Peace
Queen Cup.
Since her appointment as coach last November, Pia Sundhage appears to have taken the US national
team from strength to strength. The Olympics will be the first major championship of her tenure,
and it will be interesting to see how far this team can go. The 18-woman squad includes nine of the
players who won gold medals in the 2004 Athens Olympics.
WPS may yet add an eighth team before the league debuts in April, 2009, and San Diego is the latest
city to be mooted. The prospective team is the brainchild of the wonderfully named Platini Soaf,
who has put himself forward as coach and has already met with officials at the University of San
Diego with an eye towards using the university's Torero Stadium as the team's home base.
Lauren Cheshire has seen Bend It Like Beckham "a couple of hundred times", and now her
life is imitating art, or at least following the plot of her favourite film. The 16-year-old left
winger from Portsmouth has won a scholarship to play at Judson University in Chicago, where she
also plans to study sports management.
The Unites States just managed to take all three points against Brazil, with the only goal of the
game scored by Amy Rodriguez late in the first half. Brazil managed to create a few decent chances,
in spite of missing their biggest stars, while the US lost both Christie Rampone (ankle) and Carli
Lloyd (broken nose) to injuries during the course of the match.
Abby Wambach underwent a successful surgery Thursday morning to repair the broken tibia and fibula
in her left leg, with a titanium rod inserted to reinforce the tibia. She is expected to begin
rehabilitation in five or six weeks, though it will take much longer than that to reach her former
level of play.
Over the next several days, I'll be doing a brief profile of each of the teams participating in
Beijing 2008. First up, the host nation: Historically, the Steel Roses have been the undisputed
leader on the Asian football scene, but they've endured some disappointing results recently - most
notably a 3-0 loss to Japan in February's East Asian Federation championship.
The US defeated Brazil for the second time this week, this time at San Diego's Torero Stadium, in
their final match before heading off to Beijing. Once again they managed to secure a 1-0 victory -
this time via an 84th minute taken by Carli Lloyd and headed in by Natasha Kai. Before the match,
most of the hype centred on Abby Wambach, who seemed destined to be one of the stars of the Beijing
Olympics.
The US snatched a 1-0 win today in the first of two matches against Brazil, played before a crowd
of 15,000 in Colorado. While it may not have been the most scintillating match ever, it was
interesting as a sneak preview between two of the Olympic favourites.
