It’s nice, at least on a relative scale of nice, to have a federation that is willing to fill up the calendar for its women’s national team in a non-tournament year. USSF took nearly every FIFA window to schedule a women’s friendly (although perhaps they could have let one slide given the timing against the NWSL season), and even ran two mini-tournaments this year. Many other WNTs are definitely not blessed with the same level of involvement or funding, Canada among them. The flip side of that is not every single game the USWNT plays is an absolute banger, and indeed it’s an oft-cited criticism of the WNT that they have a bad tendency to play fluff opponents, with apologies to some of those opponents.
Three things we learned from USA vs Canada
