KASHIMA, Japan – One by one, the players for the mighty U.S. women’s national team filed off the soccer field at an empty stadium about 90 minutes east of Tokyo. They were headed both toward the locker room and an uncertain future in these Olympics.
If they were being honest, they did not look all that mighty, not Tuesday night and not in these Games, not yet. Instead, three contests in pool play—a brutal loss to Sweden, a bounce-back win over New Zealand and, this time, a scoreless tie vs. Australia—qualified the U.S. women for the knockout stage but raised more questions than they answered.